It's been exactly one year (as of this blog) since the day I registered this Codeforces account, and also one year since the day I started cp. It's time I look back on what I have achieved as a random tryhard kid on this platform.

I started this journey having known basically nothing about coding (other than basic syntaxes) and wanted to become among the very best (like tourist). At first I thought everything was easy (as I only did 800 problems), but the fact that I failed to do C in the first ever division 4 contest I had made me change my mind really quickly. From then on, it was a journey of doing contests, reading editorial, trying my best to actually understand up to C-D, learn from it, and repeat.

I actually rarely do upsolving, just hanging about in the problemset finding fun and easy problems to pass the time. By now I have known some basic things like prefix/suffix sums and binary search, but never enough for me to really think that I actually deserve the Expert title. Having a lot of experience with math contests and logical thinking, I generally can come up with solutions fast, so I guess that's in some way an advantage.

Starting out as a kid who would do anything to improve my rating, now I have focused more on the important part of contests — trying to solve as many as possible and not care much about these rating points. I don't have plans to go to any big cp olympiads in the future though, for now it's just self-improvement and giving my best.

Thanks for reading and have fun coding :)