First of all I want to say thanks to the community and the administration of the website of course.

My name is Ruslan I’m 31 years old. I’m not a native English speaker, so please forgive me for my style and mistakes. I have almost 10 year of experience mostly in fintech. I hope you’ll read it till the end.

Today is a small anniversary. One year ago I joined this community. It was a great journey. I remember the great feelings about solving tough problems. I also remember the feeling so stupid about being unable to write the simplest binary search. One of the brightest moments of this journey when I for the first time tried to participate in the contest. You may ask me “Why are you writing all of this? What’s the point of it?” and I’m going to answer you. I want to share my story with you. I also want to share my experience. I want to help others to build their confidence.I just want to share my thoughts with you.

I want to start from reviewing my entire experience with this platform. By now I’ve solved almost 900 different questions - 892 if to be precise. 319 - easy, 490 - medium, - hard. Now let’s take a look at my submission history.

I few times I gave up and just “eating” myself for being so stupid. Then something happened and I was thinking about these top guys. They have two hands, one head etc as well as I. So it was a question of how well you are prepared. Before I’d watched the MIT 6.006 course I had some random pieces of information in my head about algorithms and data structures. I watched it entirely. The picture became more clear to me. I started observing some patterns. Definitely it’s worth watching. Also I think it’s a good idea to watch top tech youtubers in order to collect useful information. BUT be careful I’m not talking about just glance at algo and reproducing it, I’m talking about grasping the general ideas and approaches.

As you might have noticed from my submission history I’ve been studying on a daily base manner, excluding one period of time. It’s the first essential tip for you. In order to develop your coding skill you need to set goals. I strongly recommend studying every day. Once you set goals you must force yourself to study every single day. It must become your habit, a good habit like brushing your teeths every day. I can guarantee you that after a while you’ll notice some addiction to your new habit. Also some of you could feel uncomfortable when they miss a day or two. It doesn’t matter how busy you are, you can always find 30 minutes on attempting to solve a problem and LeetCode challenges help a lot along this way.

The second advice follows the first one. Don’t repeat my mistakes. I was blaming myself for being “such a stupid person”. It’s okay at least now you've realized that you have gaps. One you’ve realized it, start working on them. Here you are free to choose more suitable and useful resources. It could be books, videos, online and offline courses. Choose whatever you want and push your limits.

The third advice is - in the beginning you need to study and solve problems topic by topic. Starting from tasks like reverse the array up to simple tasks on graph theory. Once you’ve done this part you need to move forward. Now try to solve some amount of random easy or medium problems. In case you struggle to do it you can cheat a little bit by solving a few easy problems. It helps to raise up your belief and confidence.

The fourth advice is to consider your participation in contests. Yes I know it scaries. But you must use your fear as a motivation to continue developing your skills. After each contest try to solve problems on your own. If you still struggle then glance at the solution and try to understand it. Some of the people say “It’s a bad idea to look at the solutions” I agree and disagree at the same time. The point is you can’t do it constantly but it might be useful in the beginning or in case you don’t have enough time for preparation.

Keep practicing and best wishes from me personally.