Hello Everyone,

I currently work as an engineer in a middleware team and I have a Bachelors degree in computer science engineering. I have been feeling that I am really not much into the software side of things and reading too much of other peoples code so I was considering other career options. I would like to know your thoughts on cryptography, what is this field like and if getting a job in this area is very difficult. Any other insights will also be helpful.

Hi Everyone,

I gave my first ever contest on codeforces recently which was Codeforces Educational Round 151 and I am really happy to become rated. The problems felt really good, I was able to solve A,B and C during the contest and later I was able to upsolve D. I also placed 2530. Since this was my first contest here I would like to make it special by thanking the creators of this round namely adedalic , BledDest , Neon and awoo with all my heart via this blog. Thank you so much guys, keep up the good work !

Yesterday I wrote a blog on the topic "Stack solution to best time to buy and sell stock 4" and it has been met with downvotes. I request the codeforces community not to downvote it just because I am unrated/lower-rated because it has a few demerits, namely-

1. If someone is genuinly confused about the stack solution then they may find it hard to believe my blog by seeing the downvotes and may not even go through the trouble of even reading it.

2. This blog is also my first ever blog on the internet and its really demotivating if it gets disliked for no good reason.

If there is something wrong with the blog, tell me and I will correct it. If there is something fundamentally wrong with my understanding which makes the whole blog incorrect then tell me and I will remove it but dont just go about blindly downvoting without even going through the trouble of reading it. If you dont understand the blog completely then its fine but it doesnt necessarily make the blog useless. Try solving the problem on your own then come again at a later time to understand it. I can give you 75% of the picture but the rest 25% effort you have to do it by yourself to convince your mind that the solution indeed is okay and working. The downvotes option is for useless or offensive blogs so use it wisely. Countless top rated problem solvers have said one should not care about the rating, just enjoy learning concepts and solve problems and yet there are many who downvote/upvote by just looking at the rating no matter what/how good the contents of the blog are.

The problem statement can be referred from here. In short you are given an array "prices" and you need to determine the maximum profit one can earn by doing atmost k trades. You cannot buy a stock unless you have sold the previous one. The dynamic programming solution to this is well known and solves the problem in O(nk) time but did you know a stack+heap solution to this also exists that solves the problem in O(n+nlogk) time? This second solution is not as famous and I have only ever managed to find 2 or 3 articles explaining the solution and that too were not very clear and full of symbols instead of a visual explanation. So here in this article I will try to explain this solution as clearly as I can.