In yesterday's contest Codeforces Round 865 (Div. 1) I've got the achievement which I could not imagine just half a year ago — reach 2400 rating and become GM.

The first time I learned about CF was on 2022.2, that time I registered this account and took my first contest. But my first submission 146390589 on contest got TLE, and I solved 0 problem in this contest. (At that time I didn't know that's because the efficiency of java.util.Scanner is extremely low) And because I needed to deal with graduation thesis, I didn't use CF until the end of last year, when I restarted CF contest.

At 4th and 5th contests I solved div2D problems to reach blue. In my 9th contest, I first time solved div2E problem in contest, and I became purple in my 12th contest. In my 14th and 15th contest, I solved div2E problems twice and became orange. In the next weeks, I started to hit the upper limit of my skill, and dropped from orange twice.

In order to improve my skill of competive programming, I practiced problems in CF problemset everyday, and when practicing I tried to solve every problem with 2000-2500 difficulty by the reverse order in the problemset. I took part in every rated CF contest (except Codeforces Round 856 (Div. 2) which was timed at 01:35 UTC+8), and learned many new techniques from problems I could not solve in contests. I also used other CP platfroms like atcoder, where I've reached rating 2233.

It seems that practice was pretty effective for me. I got well performance in last 3 contests rated for div1, and first time became red yesterday. Although there's still a large promotion space for me, it's an important meaningful moment in my life of competitive programming. Hope that I will be more active to face the challange in the future.

Thank for MikeMirzayanov and every contributors of CodeForces community for bring me into the world of competitive programming and helping me find the meaning of my life.