FINALLY I AM SPECIALIST !!!

I have been doing Competitive programming for nearly 4 years now, I achieved many wins in national competitions and other Platforms but somehow Codeforces was my weak point, I've been stuck in newbie rating for longer than anyone could imagine (even after attending 60+ contests).

If you can take a look at my rating graph, you will notice a huge gap, that is when I stopped doing Codeforces because at some point I decided that it's not for me, I was starting to be good at solving Div.2 A-B in 15 minutes but I keep messing up Problem C even with 1H 30 minutes of solving it. At first I thought it was a knowledge issue so I started working on my algos and DP, that helped me get better in national contests and technical interviews, but not Div.2 C. At that point I stopped attending contests due to me hitting the rock bottom saying that I will never get better.

After a while, I started remembering how couldn't even get to PUPIL rating and I couldn't even get a single Accepted verdict on simple problems but now Alhamdolilah I can solve them in a matter of seconds, that made me rethink what could be the issue in the famous problem C.

After starting again, attending many contests and hitting the 100 mark (yes 100 contests and still not Expert lol) I started to notice a pattern: I always start solving problem C with the mindset that it's impossible for me to even think of the idea. Now, fixing a bad mindset is harder than training to solve problems, I can now solve up to 1800 rating problems but not in the contest, heck I can even solve them in 30 mins which is an EXPERT level, but I can not do that while being in the contest. Luckily, as problem solvers we know that one step of solving the problem is knowing what it is about, now I know what was my issue, and I am starting to fix it.

I decided to write this very long text to say to all people who are stuck in PUPIL, or even NEWBIE: Don't look at other people's ratings, you can find a lot of them starting after you and getting to specialist and expert, that does not prove anything, people are different, but at some point, you will get your blue color, that is now my mindset, even if it takes 4 more years, I will get it.

Have a nice day everyone, hope you can get your color too :P

I would like to add my first ever contribution to the codeforces space, it is targeted to the NEOVIM people!

I recently created a codeforces tool where you can fetch contests sample tests and test your solution against those tests as well as submitting your solution to codeforces all from your neovim setup with some few shortcuts.

The tool is still new and it might have some bugs and more importantly it only supports C++ and PYTHON for the moment, hope you like it and maybe if you find it helpful and you are more into JAVA or some other programming language make it support it and make a PR to help other people from other programming languages use it.

The main thing about it is that it uses the codeforces API and I tried to avoid scraping as much as I could, but we all know that there is no submission option in the codeforces API, hope it becomes available someday.

Check out the repo, it's basically my neovim setup including the tool, it is based on the amazing distribution "lazy.vim". You will find some images of usage below.

Repo: https://github.com/BerqiaMouad/Neovim-Setup

Usage:

• Create a contest:

• Create problem:

• Test against sample tests: