the ko_osaga interview

Revision en1, by MladenP, 2026-03-01 15:13:15

I'm excided to finally show my interview with ko_osaga that was recorded way too long ago (at World Finals, sorry ko_osaga). Still, I believe the conversation is timeless, so check it out! I was a big fan of ko_osaga back in high school, as he was one of the few top guys that was still active in the Olympiad community. He's the original creator of the OI checklist, IOI gold medalist and finalist of most big competitions you can think of. Now, he's a PhD candidate at MIT — we talk about the journey from competitive programming to algorithms research, competitive programming in South Korea and much more.

P.S. As I mentioned in my last blog post, I've changed jobs and have much less time for working on Olympicode. I've also finished my ICPC career at last World Finals, so I don't expect to travel to many competitions in the near future, so this might be the last interview for a while. Might try switching to some online interviews, but I feel like that takes away a lot of the magic of in-person interviews.

Additionally, since only a few people are submitting to Olympicode Judge a month and I've been paying for the hosting and everything, I decided to shut it down for now, until I decide what to do with it. We'll port the Olympicode Open Olympiad to the Codeforces Gym at some point (or another judge is welcome to publish it, all the data is in the OOO blog post). Everything else you can now submit elsewhere.

Thank you all for the support, it was great meeting some of you in-person and stay tuned for what the future holds (once I figure it out :) ).

Our previous podcasts in case you missed them:

Tags olympicode, cpp

History

 
 
 
 
Revisions
 
 
  Rev. Lang. By When Δ Comment
en1 English MladenP 2026-03-01 15:13:15 2951 Initial revision (published)