Update in 2025: I've mostly forgotten about this site, but recently something rather funny came up: I was looking for a way to get a relatively large number of free subdomains (name of the url not mattering at all), when I realized I was still paying for cp-notes.com. So I tried to login to the AWS account owning the domain (which I haven't done in years), but it prompted me to check the email associated with it for a verification code... Unfortunately, I had used my Columbia university email out of convenience, but that has been disabled! (which I suspect has something to do with me dropping out?) I actually can still update the website (not that I was planning to) since I have some keypair saved which allows programmatic access, but not being able to use the console is a huge pain. I could also contact AWS support, but I feel like that would take a while...
Anyways, it is time for me to express some of my frustrations: Fuck Columbia University! In addition to disabling my email, I have pretty much not been able to step foot on campus for the past 2 years even though I live nearby, because they have secured campus due to protests. There's a form for which you can
upd: Added a few platforms, also you can now flame me here: https://discord.com/invite/R66xRwH7N5
tl;dr cp-notes.com is a web application where you can maintain a profile of solved/unsolved problems from several different competitive programming platforms. You can write notes about each problem (with support for LaTeX and images!). If you think your notes for a particular problem are substantial/useful enough, you may choose to publish them so that they will be publicly visible. Public notes can be upvoted, searched for, and will have their own comment section. Receiving upvotes on your public notes will also raise your contribution, for which there is a leaderboard (lol)
Oh yeah, you can also link your CF account in your settings page, and have your username color displayed.
Screenshots
Motivation
- I think the primary purpose of my site is to be an improvement tool. In my opinion, in order to "become good," it's necessary to reflect on past problems and try to reuse their ideas. Even adding notes to your profile which you don't write anything about can be helpful in this regard, since they serve as some sort of personal reminder. Of course, I can't really personally attest to the success of this because I suck at CP myself, but I very highly suspect that it's true :^)
- Reading editorials has to be one of my least favorite parts of CP. It feels quite often that the most helpful insight into the problem is some random comment. This is quite annoying in of itself, since finding this comment usually requires a lot of needless scrolling. A solution to this could be posting such insights as published notes on my website. (On an unrelated note, it's completely understandable that editorials are usually quite informal for the sake of conciseness, writing that stuff is exhausting)
- This last point is definitely more speculative, but it seems that there's a good number of people who have some desire to share cool thoughts about cool problems! Talking/writing about this stuff is fun — I know I'm not completely alone in having a problems blog which nobody reads.
- I'm currently on a gap year, and making this site made me feel productive!
Kinda expecting this site to be a complete flop, so give me github stars to fill the void in my soul once it inevitably does!
