← back to the skyAnsh Chaturmohta
10h56m −44°

Competitive

Codeforces Expert, CodeChef 5 star. The ratings are old news; the habit they built is not.

Expert · 1795
Codeforces peak
5 star · 2008
CodeChef peak
Top 0.5%
JEE Advanced, of 1.3 million
500+
problems I later set for others
C++AlgorithmsData structuresContests

What it actually gave me

Not the ratings. The reflex of reading the constraints before writing a line, and of asking what breaks at the limit rather than what works in the demo. Years later that is still the most useful thing I carry into a backend problem: the slow query, the race between two requests, the input nobody thought to try.

The other side of the table

After a few years of competing I started writing the problems instead, 500+ of them for Masai and LevelUp. Setting a good problem is harder than solving one. You have to find every edge case before a few thousand people find it for you, and you have to make something hard feel learnable.

Where it sits now

Honestly: I do not grind contests any more, and the ratings have not moved in a while. I keep this here because it is where the fundamentals came from, and because it is a hunger I would like back one day.

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