Blog seriously
Sometimes I receive letters with offers to sell myself as a blogger, that is, to write custom-made things for a certain reward. For the most part, these are unworthy and inappropriate ventures such as viral marketing, which do not require special writing skills that a person who respects himself and his business does not agree to (unless, of course, he dies of starvation). But once I received an offer I couldn’t refuse, if only because I had dreamed about it for several years. So I became one of the three official bloggers TopCoder Open 2010. In this article I’ll talk about how the Blog label settled for six months in my post, about how unexpectedly it turned out to be difficult to write on a given (even if you love) topic within fixed timetable, and how it all ended.
The TCO (and earlier a similar tournament for TCCC students) is held every year, and every year the organizers make a lot of effort to make the tournament as interesting as possible for participants and observers. The culmination of the tournament is the onsight finals, and it is very important to convey the spirit of what is happening there to viewers watching only on the Internet. Since 2007, TopCoder has been experimenting with blog formats to do it best. Once we even had a video blog, shot by specially invited professionals, but usually the blog has a more familiar form of text and photos, and is written by admins and / or selected community members (hmm, TC member sounds better). Until this year, the report was conducted only from the finals, and bloggers were selected on a competitive basis under one article in which they had to prove why they should be chosen. I never participated in these contests; once I was still small, then there were other things, I was just too shy to present my piggy snout in the Kalashny series of previous winners - stars of the scale of Peter Mitrichev (who was one of the first "elected" bloggers, unexpectedly dropping out in the last round Algorithm).
This year, TopCoder decided to introduce an element of novelty in the blog itself and in the selection procedure for bloggers. The blogger nominations were chosen by a closed admin vote (or by one of the admins alone - right, I don’t know) based on the totality of previous services to the community. The blog was supposed to be conducted for half a year - on the article per week from the start of online competitions to the start of the finals, and the prize for such a busy schedule was a trip to Las Vegas for the finals, from which it was supposed to write three or four articles a day. However, a specific timetable was announced after all bloggers happily agreed - although I don’t think that this information would change their decisions :-)
So, I received a blog schedule and an invitation to onsite and in parallel with the visa extraction in the USA (which is another quest in itself) thought for the first time, what am I going to write for the first six months? At the finals, everything is clear - you circulate in the Arena, communicate with people, take pictures of everything that comes under the lens - something will be invented. But during the online rounds the task is more interesting - after all, everything that happens, it happens online, is available for observation, and I do not have access to any exclusive information. Well, almost to no one - I wrote tasks for three rounds, but I could only comment on them after the round in order to avoid spoilers :-) Also, when sectioning topics for blogs, I got my favorite Marathons, which I can talk about for a long time, but of which there were only three in six months, not a very rich source of news. Two other bloggers, Fred and Justin, got Algorithms and Components, respectively.
')
Here are a few categories of posts that I can highlight to fill the online blog with at least something interesting, and how they were used by me and other bloggers:
The category is obvious, but rather complicated, in which only the descriptions of the three Marathons fell. I could not participate in the rounds themselves (as the author of some of the first two), and the decisions of the participants are discussed in the forum immediately after the match. Therefore, I could only go through how the task was conceived and how it evolved during the preparation process, and delve into the statistics - comparing the popularity of the task with previous tournaments and the distribution of participants by country. In the last round, 10 finalists were determined, for whom statistics are not particularly calculated, so they replaced it with a story about the past achievements of the finalists (and for some - about their rapid debut). Statistics in general is extremely convenient for a blogger - do not know what to write about? - count some statistics or compare something with something.
Fred himself participated in the Algo-rounds, so he wrote about them “from the inside,” with minutely reportage and screencasts, and also played with the shortest problem solutions (the entire solution is pushed into the return statement — not the best programming style, almost obfuscation) and laid out the odds - statistics on the participants' chances to qualify for the finals and win, calculated by modeling the remaining rounds.
Justin, for whom the components on TopCoder are the main work, approached the matter even more thoroughly: since these competitions consisted in accumulating points for many ordinary components, there is no sense to write about them individually, he wrote about the general ideology of each type of competition, starting with Conceptualization .
Perhaps the only category that I failed categorically. For me, it still remains a mystery, about what is really interesting you can ask a person after the Marathon. The standard “how much time I spent, whether I liked the task, whether I expected it to win,” is boring.
Fred ran into the other side of the interview - even if you know what to ask, you still need to get an answer! This is a personal meeting, you can drive a person into a corner, block the path to retreat and not release until you answer - and by mail it is very difficult, almost impossible.
Justin was the only one of us who managed to embed interviews with experienced competitors into our posts. Personally, I secretly suspect that he simply blackmailed them using his official position ;-)
The category is very convenient to score the air and to flaunt one's own style, but again, not easy due to the fact that English is not my first language, and I speak much less flowery than my native Russian :-) welcome post with an overview of all types of competitions (almost habraanons , but taking into account the target audience), as well as stories about time management for participants of different types of competitions, about preparing the tournament (by the way, the only interview I managed) and about getting a visa.
Fred and Justin, on the other hand, did not abuse this category by writing only their welcome posts. Apparently, men are much cooler about social chatter and offtopics: the following three categories are almost entirely mine.
What is the point of a blog if there are no pictures or conversations? - I remembered the classics and set out to come up with pictures for the blog. Self-portrait in the welcome post and photos from the finals is sacred, but what is in between? And then I remembered one old task for cryptography, written in explanation of the “Cause of the dancing little men”, which was never launched, but was lonely in the archive of rejected tasks. “Yes!” - for some reason I exclaimed in English manner and for the evening I sketched the concept of a series of puzzles for cryptographic motifs united by the new Sherlock Holmes affair - “The Case of the Lady with TopCoder”. It all started when a man addressed Holmes, worried that his wife was receiving mysterious letters from TopCoder ...
This is how the TCO'10 Puzzle Contest appeared, which I deserve to be proud of. Perhaps, the puzzles after the first one turned out to be difficult (only 3-4 solutions for each), and the puzzles themselves are somewhat monotonous (another one, for comparing famous people with TopCoder with little-known facts about them, failed because people categorically refused to share the facts about themselves), but readers liked it!
If interested, you can see the first puzzle and its solution , as well as other puzzles .
Another entertaining element that I was going to make to the blog was games based on TopCoder. I managed to do, however, only one, and then I borrowed the mechanism of the game and many semantic elements from elegar (please note, with his kind permission): TC Alchemy . Still, my circle of interests is far enough from game development, and it turned out to be much more laborious than I could afford this summer.
Another principle that I often used in this blog is the reuse of existing knowledge to solve new problems. It helped me out with puzzles, and with the game, and with a description of the tasks that I wrote, and again when I had to write something interesting about the qualifications in this competition. It would seem that everything that could be said was already said, and the creative crisis was already very close when I remembered my favorite programming languages, and literally in the evening a post was written about solving problems from qualifications in marginal languages.
Before this experience, I kept only a personal blog, but I wrote quite a lot about TopCoder in it, and it seemed to me that writing about the same would not be much more difficult. It turned out that writing a post a week, regardless of mood and inspiration, is much more difficult, especially in English. Not all the ideas were realized - for example, fairy tales, unlike poems, are written only on inspiration, so none of them got into the blog; the ideas of a couple of games and one puzzle rested in peace (I hope, not with an eternal sleep); well, and before the interview with the sponsors, the hands reached only on oncite. But the experience as a whole is useful, and if we also include that abyss of the new and interesting that was on the trip to the finals, then we can confidently say that letters with offers to sell (one of which started everything) the definition of spam must still be read.
PS Actually the blog itself - topcoder.com/home/tco10 .
Prologue
The TCO (and earlier a similar tournament for TCCC students) is held every year, and every year the organizers make a lot of effort to make the tournament as interesting as possible for participants and observers. The culmination of the tournament is the onsight finals, and it is very important to convey the spirit of what is happening there to viewers watching only on the Internet. Since 2007, TopCoder has been experimenting with blog formats to do it best. Once we even had a video blog, shot by specially invited professionals, but usually the blog has a more familiar form of text and photos, and is written by admins and / or selected community members (hmm, TC member sounds better). Until this year, the report was conducted only from the finals, and bloggers were selected on a competitive basis under one article in which they had to prove why they should be chosen. I never participated in these contests; once I was still small, then there were other things, I was just too shy to present my piggy snout in the Kalashny series of previous winners - stars of the scale of Peter Mitrichev (who was one of the first "elected" bloggers, unexpectedly dropping out in the last round Algorithm).
This year, TopCoder decided to introduce an element of novelty in the blog itself and in the selection procedure for bloggers. The blogger nominations were chosen by a closed admin vote (or by one of the admins alone - right, I don’t know) based on the totality of previous services to the community. The blog was supposed to be conducted for half a year - on the article per week from the start of online competitions to the start of the finals, and the prize for such a busy schedule was a trip to Las Vegas for the finals, from which it was supposed to write three or four articles a day. However, a specific timetable was announced after all bloggers happily agreed - although I don’t think that this information would change their decisions :-)
Formulation of the problem
So, I received a blog schedule and an invitation to onsite and in parallel with the visa extraction in the USA (which is another quest in itself) thought for the first time, what am I going to write for the first six months? At the finals, everything is clear - you circulate in the Arena, communicate with people, take pictures of everything that comes under the lens - something will be invented. But during the online rounds the task is more interesting - after all, everything that happens, it happens online, is available for observation, and I do not have access to any exclusive information. Well, almost to no one - I wrote tasks for three rounds, but I could only comment on them after the round in order to avoid spoilers :-) Also, when sectioning topics for blogs, I got my favorite Marathons, which I can talk about for a long time, but of which there were only three in six months, not a very rich source of news. Two other bloggers, Fred and Justin, got Algorithms and Components, respectively.
')
Here are a few categories of posts that I can highlight to fill the online blog with at least something interesting, and how they were used by me and other bloggers:
1. Thematic posts
The category is obvious, but rather complicated, in which only the descriptions of the three Marathons fell. I could not participate in the rounds themselves (as the author of some of the first two), and the decisions of the participants are discussed in the forum immediately after the match. Therefore, I could only go through how the task was conceived and how it evolved during the preparation process, and delve into the statistics - comparing the popularity of the task with previous tournaments and the distribution of participants by country. In the last round, 10 finalists were determined, for whom statistics are not particularly calculated, so they replaced it with a story about the past achievements of the finalists (and for some - about their rapid debut). Statistics in general is extremely convenient for a blogger - do not know what to write about? - count some statistics or compare something with something.
Fred himself participated in the Algo-rounds, so he wrote about them “from the inside,” with minutely reportage and screencasts, and also played with the shortest problem solutions (the entire solution is pushed into the return statement — not the best programming style, almost obfuscation) and laid out the odds - statistics on the participants' chances to qualify for the finals and win, calculated by modeling the remaining rounds.
Justin, for whom the components on TopCoder are the main work, approached the matter even more thoroughly: since these competitions consisted in accumulating points for many ordinary components, there is no sense to write about them individually, he wrote about the general ideology of each type of competition, starting with Conceptualization .
2. Interview
Perhaps the only category that I failed categorically. For me, it still remains a mystery, about what is really interesting you can ask a person after the Marathon. The standard “how much time I spent, whether I liked the task, whether I expected it to win,” is boring.
Fred ran into the other side of the interview - even if you know what to ask, you still need to get an answer! This is a personal meeting, you can drive a person into a corner, block the path to retreat and not release until you answer - and by mail it is very difficult, almost impossible.
Justin was the only one of us who managed to embed interviews with experienced competitors into our posts. Personally, I secretly suspect that he simply blackmailed them using his official position ;-)
3. The spirit of TCO (he's talking about nothing)
The category is very convenient to score the air and to flaunt one's own style, but again, not easy due to the fact that English is not my first language, and I speak much less flowery than my native Russian :-) welcome post with an overview of all types of competitions (almost habraanons , but taking into account the target audience), as well as stories about time management for participants of different types of competitions, about preparing the tournament (by the way, the only interview I managed) and about getting a visa.
Fred and Justin, on the other hand, did not abuse this category by writing only their welcome posts. Apparently, men are much cooler about social chatter and offtopics: the following three categories are almost entirely mine.
4. Puzzles
What is the point of a blog if there are no pictures or conversations? - I remembered the classics and set out to come up with pictures for the blog. Self-portrait in the welcome post and photos from the finals is sacred, but what is in between? And then I remembered one old task for cryptography, written in explanation of the “Cause of the dancing little men”, which was never launched, but was lonely in the archive of rejected tasks. “Yes!” - for some reason I exclaimed in English manner and for the evening I sketched the concept of a series of puzzles for cryptographic motifs united by the new Sherlock Holmes affair - “The Case of the Lady with TopCoder”. It all started when a man addressed Holmes, worried that his wife was receiving mysterious letters from TopCoder ...
This is how the TCO'10 Puzzle Contest appeared, which I deserve to be proud of. Perhaps, the puzzles after the first one turned out to be difficult (only 3-4 solutions for each), and the puzzles themselves are somewhat monotonous (another one, for comparing famous people with TopCoder with little-known facts about them, failed because people categorically refused to share the facts about themselves), but readers liked it!
If interested, you can see the first puzzle and its solution , as well as other puzzles .
5. Games
Another entertaining element that I was going to make to the blog was games based on TopCoder. I managed to do, however, only one, and then I borrowed the mechanism of the game and many semantic elements from elegar (please note, with his kind permission): TC Alchemy . Still, my circle of interests is far enough from game development, and it turned out to be much more laborious than I could afford this summer.
6. Programming languages
Another principle that I often used in this blog is the reuse of existing knowledge to solve new problems. It helped me out with puzzles, and with the game, and with a description of the tasks that I wrote, and again when I had to write something interesting about the qualifications in this competition. It would seem that everything that could be said was already said, and the creative crisis was already very close when I remembered my favorite programming languages, and literally in the evening a post was written about solving problems from qualifications in marginal languages.
Epilogue
Before this experience, I kept only a personal blog, but I wrote quite a lot about TopCoder in it, and it seemed to me that writing about the same would not be much more difficult. It turned out that writing a post a week, regardless of mood and inspiration, is much more difficult, especially in English. Not all the ideas were realized - for example, fairy tales, unlike poems, are written only on inspiration, so none of them got into the blog; the ideas of a couple of games and one puzzle rested in peace (I hope, not with an eternal sleep); well, and before the interview with the sponsors, the hands reached only on oncite. But the experience as a whole is useful, and if we also include that abyss of the new and interesting that was on the trip to the finals, then we can confidently say that letters with offers to sell (one of which started everything) the definition of spam must still be read.
PS Actually the blog itself - topcoder.com/home/tco10 .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/288226/
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