Hello, everyone who is reading this blog. I want to start by saying that I will write all of my blogs in English to practice this language with the help of Copilot and ChatGPT AI. Please feel free to correct me if I make a mistake.

As the title suggests, this blog is about my amazing journey in Competitive Programming (CP). I wanted to write this blog a while ago but… I forgot😚. If I leave it for too long, I fear that I will actually forget and not be able to record my memorable time. So let’s begin!

Early days in CP ​

The story began in an Informatics Class. My teacher, Hieu, was looking for students who were interested in coding. Our class was a Specialization in Math, so only about 7 students, including 3 who had prior experience, raised their hands when asked.

A few days later, on the 4th floor of the school building, we were introduced to C++ for the first time. I didn’t know it was called CP at that time, so I referred to it as “học code”. Our teacher gave us, the 7 students from my class and some others from the Informatics class, problems in PDF files to solve on our own in the early days. After a few weeks of lectures on loops, recursion, etc., some of us gave up, leaving exactly 6 of us remaining: 3 of Informatics class and 3 of Maths class.

I still vividly recall the days when we were striving to climb the ranks on the Codefun website, our first online platform for competing with others. My highest rank fluctuated between 3 and 4, but the top student was a prodigy who had won the First Prize in Math in the 9th grade. I used to think I would never be able to catch up with him because he was incredibly talented. However, he eventually gave up programming to join the school’s Math team. We didn’t interact much in high school. His journey taught me a valuable lesson: success comes from pursuing your passions with love and dedication, not just from innate talent.

At a point when I believed I had grasped it all… ​

Let’s not dwell on my 10th grade experiences, as there’s not much to share.