Hi all!

I'm proud to announce Competitive Programming Academy, my new programming competition training community.

Though the broad objective of CPA is to help people grow as competitive programmers, there are three specific goals I hope to achieve with this program:

1. To provide a programming competition community focused specifically on training and growth. There are many existing communities that work well for discussing programming contests, but I think having one emphasizing training will make it easier for people to ask questions without fear of being ignored (or downvoted). Of course, the other advantage of asking questions there is that I'll be around to answer them. Additionally, my hope is that having a community with which to train is likely to help people who don't have other competitive programmers around locally find motivation to grow.
2. Helping people create training plans and find helpful resources to use while practicing. While I'm not convinced there's a huge difference between various training platforms (e.g. I don't think it matters much whether you solve problems on Codeforces versus AtCoder versus Codechef versus Kattis, as long as you solve problems at all), I do think identifying these resources may be helpful for complete beginners, and for others, I'm hoping to minimize the amount of time trainees need to spend thinking about how to train in order to maximize the amount of time they can actually spend training.
3. Communicating the intuition behind challenging problems. While most successful competitive programmers train individually (and this approach is generally effective), I think there's one question most people have trouble answering on their own or with editorials while working on challenging problems: how would I have thought of that? I think the most important way I (or a coach/mentor/etc in general) can help with the training process is by helping trainees build the intuition helpful in solving competition problems.

In particular, I should note that because I don't want to restrict CPA to a smaller size, it is not a one-on-one training program--for the most part, I won't be able to select specific problems for each individual person in the program, for example. If enough people would find it useful, I'm open to creating some sort of community-based mentoring structure, matching mentors with groups of trainees for a more personal touch. (My instinct, however, is that this is probably not the way to go because finding active and effective mentors would be challenging and because a similar concept has been tried in the past and failed, so I plan to implement it only if much of the community is fairly convinced that this would be useful.)

Currently, the plans include a set of chats for general discussions and questions and answers and moderated discussion sessions after Codeforces rounds or group virtual contests. I'm starting small because I'd like to get a sense for the program's scale and what people are looking for before expanding too much--in the near future, I'm hoping to add additional services. Some ideas I've been bouncing around include the aforementioned mentoring program, lectures (with accompanying problemsets) on specific topics that come up regularly in contests, and a problem-of-the-day system.

Competitive Programming Academy is hosted on Discord--join the server at https://discord.gg/VxVnGHu. Please read the announcements in #first-time, fill out the linked form, and you'll be added soon afterwards. Please make sure to read the rules and guidelines carefully. To ensure a high quality of discourse, violations of these rules will result in mutes and/or bans from the server.

Looking forward to seeing many of you there!