Topcoder Competitive Programming Comments
In reponse to some comments off platform, I wanted to take a few minutes to address the importance of competitive programming at Topcoder.
Competitive programming is what we are known for, however Topcoder has many other things on our platform for freelancers. We have learning materials, challenges for earning money, freelance gigs, and so much more. At the end of the day, Topcoder is a business and we need to make money to pay for our amazing problem writers and testers as well as @hmehta who is the man behind the scenes making sure we always remember our legacy.
More importantly, we are a community. All of you who come to our platform for SRMs and to read our latest editorials truly matter. We have been doing our best to continue the legacy of SRMs as the old school way of competitive programming.
It may see like things are quiet but we are still here caring for our community as a whole. Feel free to reach out to me or Harshit any time with your ideas or even join us. We are currently looking for a program manager to help us kickstart a new competitive programming experience. So if you care about Topcoder or want to help us make improvements, we're all ears.
Comments
What I do like about the Topcoder approach is that you don't need to write any boilerplate code for parsing the input, since the problem statement is abstracted to a class definition.
One minus is that it's hard to find out about the SRM competitions. There is the Google calendar, but that is a bit hard to find. CF and other sites have simple countdown elements on their sites showing when the competitions are held.
It is also a bit chaotic regarding finding the arena (both web and java version) and there is no good landing page for Algorithm competitions. The Thrive content itself is quite nice, but it is hard to find things there, the content could IMO be presented and organized better.