Today, I finished my last CP contest — NOIP 2024 in China. I will be leaving CP, and of course, Codeforces and other coding websites.

I know that some CF users may downvote this when they see that I'm only a pupil here. But since I'm leaving, I will not care about my contribution anymore. In fact I never cared about it even when one of my comments got 15 downvotes.

You can see from my CF rating(1385) and my AtCoder Rating(1546) that I am only a noob. Once I only passed 5 out of all the 7 problems in a CF div4. I just know nothing about number theory and things like that. I can't even remember some basic algorithms like Tarjan's algorithm. I have a feeling that my coding ability is always going down.

But that is not the main reason why I quit CP. I started learning coding 6 years ago, and began on my way of CP in January 2021, because I was interested in computers and of course, coding. Before the spring of 2024, everything was fine. I spent a lot of time on coding classes, but I wasn't very annoyed by the time it took because I simply loved coding. However, everything has changed. I entered Junior 3 this September, and the amount of homework increased drastically. Although I still have plenty of time to relax(yeah, if I sleep at 1 am), spending 12 hours on coding is too much for me. Gradually, coding became a thing that makes me feel unpleasant. I lost my interest in coding. I attended less and less coding classes, and finally, I totally stopped going to the class, although I never quitted it. In fact the last coding class I took is on 5th October — nearly two months ago.

Also, coding just affects my family members' life too much. I still can't forget the terrible thing that happened on 19th July this year. That night, my brother attended CodeForces Round 959. As we are in China, he had to stay up until 1 am to finish the contest, and to check the results, he didn't go to bed until 2 am. This annoyed my mother because she didn't know what my brother was doing. They had a terrible quarrel. Now I think that even if mom did know that he was competing in a CP contest, she would still get angry, because she would still have to sleep for only 4.5 hours since she needed to get up for work at around 6:30 am. That day, I couldn't sleep after going to bed at 3 am even if I wasn't involved in the quarrel. As a result, I got up and wrote a passage in Chinese, in which I first announced that I would be quitting CP.

After quitting CP, I will probably just focus on school work, since I am going to take an exam next June in order to get into a good senior high school. I'm not very good at school subjects, though. Maybe I will come back to coding some time in senior high school or even in university, but I'm not sure. I have completely no idea about what my school life will be after this semester and after I graduate from junior high school.

I really want to thank all those people who supported me over the last six years on my way of coding and CP — including my parents and my twin brothers, my three coding/informatics teachers, my classmates at the coding class, and all the people working for the CCF(China Computer Federation), who make it possible for coding lovers to make their lives better through CP.

I wish that all of you can have fun learning coding and attending CP contests. Good luck and Goodbye.