This year I started teaching a few friends which has scaled to a community of thousands of coders. We developed various resources this year like the ACD Ladders, Hard75 bot, ACD bot, and most importantly the ACD discord server (which now has more than 7k members-making it the biggest active Indian CP server!), the best part is all these resources are absolutely free! Thousands of coders use these resources on daily basis and have seen significant growth in their CP profiles, hundreds of students even got help in placements by these resources! The journey has been thrilling to say the least, I had never thought that we’d scale so much so quick and thanks a lot for all the support!
[TL;DR: here's a ~6 mins video covering all of this: here ]
However I resigned from Microsoft in September this year and joined a startup! The work is amazing to be honest! however the lack of bandwidth now doesn’t allow me to contribute much to teaching, I am not that active as much as I was earlier! I would like to change this, I would again like to start contributing and start my own course! Obviously I’ll have to cut a bit on other fronts- I’m dropping my plans of getting into fitness and also won’t be able to continue my own CP journey and hence am quitting CP! Yes it’s gonna be detrimental for my personal and professional growth however I don’t see another way of being in a position to contribute again to the community without quitting it.
Although I am myself am a bit against courses but lately interacting with a a lot of new coders made me realise that beginners do rely heavily on the courses as spoon feeding often is helpful at that level, and you can’t expect everyone to read blogs and search for resources online. The course I am planning would span for 4-5 months and would cover basics of DSA/CP to an extend that should be sufficient to reach expert on Codeforces and should be enough for cracking your dream orgs! I don’t consider DSA/CP to be too different and hence I don’t see a point in ranting about it rather it’s best to club both and see amazing results! I know competitive programming shall be taken as a sport and not as means of getting placed in your dream orgs but I am just trying to be pragmatic here, and making efforts in the direction most people would be helped! It would start most likely in Feb 2024, and this course would include me teaching via live sessions and doubt discussions, along with video and text resources.
Over the past few weeks I interacted with a lot of top Indian coders and tech professionals. 1 thing was clear that keeping these resources free would attract a lot of people however free resources are mostly taken for granted. hence it won’t do any good! This is something I’ve witnessed in the beginning of this year too! I am left with 2 choices here:
Make it paid and I could donate all the money to some charity, so that people understand the value of the course they are purchasing and put in the required efforts. However, this would dent my plans of promoting free education.
Have a big enough student base so that a few students taking it for granted isn’t too demotivating for my team and me! This is where I feel I should be betting! Obviously it’s not something I can do, and would need help from you guys. I am aiming for 10k on twitter, youtube and discord, If we reach this mark by the end of the year (we still have a week to do this) then I promise to start and conclude everything I just mentioned! I know some people (mostly those who don’t know me) would feel that I am trying to gain subscribers or followers here, so just to mention- none of these platforms earn me a single penny all of them are free (and even dont have monetisation enabled). Even though we have thousands of coders using ACD Ladders daily still it’s ad free to improve user experience. Yes, the twitter account might generate some money in future, but I’ll not be keeping a single penny out of it and would rather utilise all the money for the community in terms of giveaways and for developing more helpful stuff
It’s not easy to keep promoting free education specially when ed-techs are willing to pay you huge amount of money to teach on their platforms or even just to promote their platforms but I understand the financial condition of several students in college who are barely able to pay their college fees, I would never ever feel morally correct if I ever ask them to pay even a single rupee also money doesn’t really matter much beyond a point and the satisfaction you get for truly helping others is un-parallel! hence I’ve always rejected such offers and promoted free resources! I am trying to do the same now, but this time I need your help! I am not gonna spend a single penny on advertisements since the course is also gonna be 100% free! hence it must be word of mouth! If any of the Acode daily resources or if even I in person have helped you in the smallest possible way to reach where you are today then I would request you to show some support and spread this message! Let’s see if we are able to reach 10k by the end of the year, links are attached below. I hope that we reach the desired numbers by the end of the year and I am able to contribute a lot more the next year! This is my way of contributing to the community, make sure you do your part in this! Maybe this course might not be ideal for you but there could be others who could benefit from this, hence please spread the word!
Peace!
