I am very glad to introduce my guests from Deltix:
Aliaksandr sdryapko Drapko, the Head of Technology of CryptoCortex product and
Vladislav Vladik Vishnevsky, the coordinator of all competitive programming activities by Deltix and the key developer of MarketMaker product.
I am proud to be their compatriot, so let me start with some belorussian words of greetings
- Прывiтанне, Аляксандр і Уладзіслаў!
- Прывiтанне, Наталля!

- Deltix is the sponsor of the Belarus National School Olympiad in Informatics. Last spring you represented Deltix at the National Final award ceremony. The award ceremony was very touching for the winners. But what about you? How did you feel presenting them prizes? What were you thinking about at this moment?

Aliaksandr sdryapko awarded a winner at Belarus National Final, 2021
. _. _
sdryapko: I was pretty nervous. I’m not very experienced in performing in front of a large audience. So I was very afraid that I will do some stupid things. Especially in the moment of my speech before the tutorial. So I believe it was almost the same feelings as for participants :)
Vladik: I was very happy to return to this event as a representative of the main sponsor 4 years later after my personal participation :) It is very pleasant to give gifts, especially when you give these gifts to talented guys.
The most exciting and nervous moment was earlier than the National Final itself. 3 weeks before the National Final, I learned from my good friend and the head of the National Olympiad jury Kanstantsin vilcheuski Vilcheuski that they could not find sponsors. At that moment we decided that we wanted to support the National Olympiad. In an extremely short time we had to agree on the prize fund, buy prizes and deliver them to the venue of the Olympiad. The T-shirts with which we awarded the winners of the National Final I took from the manufacturer 2 hours before the train departure. I am very glad that I managed to do everything on time and please the guys :)

- I know you both started at CYF — Club of Young Firefighters — in a belorussian town Mozyr. Some readers might be surprised by its name which goes back to its location. It is a very famous school of CP and here is an impressive list of their results (in Russian). How did competitive programming start for you?
sdryapko: Competitive programming started for me in 2009. It was caused by the big CYF popularity after the first IOI medal for Mozyr. It was Aliaksei aropan Ropan's bronze medal in 2008 and all local newspapers wrote about this award. So a lot of parents wanted to send their children to CYF and I was one of them :)
Vladik: My path in competitive programming began 9 years ago at the Club of Young Firefighters. Like most of the people who got into the club, I did not know anything about programming and from the first lessons I really liked it. The fact that I myself could create some kind of program that could do everything that was limited only by my imagination seemed like magic. I am very grateful to Aleksey Borunov Borunov for all the knowledge donated and opening the road to where I am now.

2017, Belarus National School Olympiad, the Final, Vladik and altruist, coauthors of Codeforces Round #394

-Did you have a different attitude to school and to student competitions?
sdryapko: I believe that there is no big difference between school and student contests for me. I can say that student olympiads are more “mature” and more similar to real sport but it is small difference especially for sponsors because both of university students and school pupils who take part in competitive programming events are similar to us by spirit and we want to show them that we are also from this community.
Vladik: These competitions are completely different for me. At most school competitions it is enough just to solve problems well, but for student competitions this is not enough. For student competitions, teamwork skills are required. I have experienced many tragic situations when teamwork was too weak to win. It should also be noted that the tasks differ significantly in their type. In student olympiads, the focus is shifted to math / constructive problems. While at school Olympiads, the focus is on algorithmic problems with data structures.

-Which contest was the most valuable for you?
sdryapko: I had 3 major contests in my life: Belarusian OI, Open Moscow Informatics Olympiad, All-Russian school team contest. Belarusian OI was very important for me to get invitation from the university in which I wanted to study, Open Moscow Olympiad was the contest in which I reached the best individual result in my CP career (I got the 1st diploma in this cool contest), All-Russian school team contest was the contest in which I got the most valuable award (Gold medal) but it is very important to say that I was a member of a very strong team where 2 other participants were much-much stronger than me and I was just the 3rd “silly friend with zero contribution” but this award is still very important for me.
Vladik: Definitely ICPC World Final Moscow. It had been a long road for our team, we went through 3 seasons with the same lineup and were very glad that we managed to get to the final.

Anti BSUIR1 — Qwertenx, wilcot, Vladik at BSUIR Open, 2019
Team name arose from competition with BSUIR1 )

-Aliaksandr is a little bit older than Vladislav. So you have not competed against each other, have you? Or do you have another secret of getting on well?
sdryapko: We competed against each other but not in some kind of official contests. We had some discussion between Vladislav and me about who is stronger and we decided to get the answer for this question at the VK Cup 2018. My team reached a better place in the table than Vladislav's team and I won 25 USD from Vladislav :) But Vladislav is much stronger right now. And the secret of our friendship is that we have a lot of common friends from Mozyr and some CP chats. And right now we work in the same company.
Vladik: We met about 6 years ago, when I was still a schoolboy. As a student, Aliaksandr came to the club to give a lecture on Fenwick tree, then we first met.

-Aliaksandr, long ago in 2014 you made a presentation on the topic “Competitive programming and ways of learning it”. Do you still agree with your ideas? Could you share some of them?
sdryapko: It is a bit surprising for me that anyone still remembers about it :) It is very difficult to remember all items from my presentation but I believe that my main focus was on the “competitive programming is the best approach for students to increase their knowledge in computer science”. I still agree with this idea because young people like to compete against each other and win against other people. There are really fantastic emotions when you beat your friend or some strong person. So students learn computer science and receive really great emotions. And I believe that the second item in my presentation was about increasing this “competition effect across pupils”. And I still agree that a good coach should use some small things, some small prizes to increase the competitive effect for his students because this effect is the main thing that students want to receive.

-Here are some photos from the MSPU Olympiad in 2017, why was it an important step?

Vladik: It is my first attempt to create an official Olympiad. This event was funded by Aliaksandr sdryapko and by money we got for the CF round based on these tasks — Codeforces Round #416

-So you have been participants, juries, trainees, authors and sponsors. What role is the most emotional for you? Do you feel you have missed something in the field of competitive programming?
sdryapko: I believe nothing can give you the same emotions as being participants of contests. It is a real emotional storm. Every role from this list can cause some emotions but it is different emotions. I had a crazy situation when I was a member of the jury and I had the final vote and I had to decide who would receive an invitation to the final stage of Belarusian OI (based on appellation). And I had crazy emotions when I had to have a public speech for a really big number of people as a sponsor.
Vladik: All roles are beautiful in their own way, I would like to stay in all at the same time :) But unfortunately I have already started to move away from some of them due to lack of time. I work on a really great product in a company and now it is more important for me.
I had a sense of frustration when I was unable to qualify for the IOI in my last grade. But everything got better when my team and I went to the ICPC World Final. Now I believe that I have not missed anything.

-Anyway, Vladislav, you still have not said goodbye to participating, right? You still take part in CF rounds. Do you have any plans for your future in CP?
Vladik: I will continue to compete for fun. Perhaps my team will take part in another final of ICPC 2022. We do not know if we have qualified for it and we are waiting for the final decision on the NEER region quota.

-It is often said that CP is useless for a normal job. It always makes me think of the joke that the ironing board is the snowboard that betrayed its dream and found a normal job. They say that nobody uses such complicated algorithms. Deltix invites competitive programmers. Is it not secret information which complicated algorithms would they use?
sdryapko: Deltix is a company in the FinTech domain. We work primarily in the trading domain. It is very important for us to have great throughput and low latency in our applications. And computer science knowledge is very important to receive it. And analytical mindset.
Vladik: I can only confirm Aliaksandr's words. In our domain, code efficiency is one of the most important things. For example, one of our most important components uses "sqrt-decomposition", which performed much better in tests than the established set of production algorithms.

-How was born the idea to have Deltix rounds on CF? Are you lucky to have creating tasks as a part of your job or is it a voluntary project?
sdryapko: We just wanted to show to the community that our company is close to the competitive programming community by mindset and spirit and we have interesting tasks and challenges for people from it. It was the main idea that was “parent” of Deltix CF rounds.
Creating tasks is not our main job. All people from Deltix involved in round creation are very important developers and managers for different Deltix projects. So it is a more voluntary project but all people in Deltix have a strong understanding that they should work for company success, because they will get personal success after it. And they have thoughts that Deltix rounds are a very important part of this company success.
Vladik: This is my old dream from school to create a competition that can remain in the history of competitions. I hope that Deltix rounds is the start of something like this and it will become something even bigger in the future with offline finals every year. It was my idea to create a competition and this idea found support in Deltix. I am very glad that it turns out to combine the realization of my dream and, at the same time, tell a large audience about a place that I love very much.
In fact, all round organizing is part of my job, but apart from that I am a key developer on several other products. Compared to my other projects, I would rather call this a voluntary project.

2019, BSUIR Open School, Vladik ’s first year of being its author and jury

-Why have you decided to have very pleasant prizes? Do you just like giving presents?
sdryapko: We just wanted to build a strong association between some pleasant emotions and Deltix for the competitive programmers community. And I believe that our rounds participants received these emotions from our tasks and from our prizes.

Vladik: And we would like to thank all the great people who help the rounds to be like this:
Alexander AleXman111 Krivosheev helps a lot with technical materials and coming up with problems.
Eugene Pisarchick, Varvara Yanchuk and Sergey Remsha are responsible for grammar in Russian and English, as well as for translating all materials into English.
Nastya is responsible for illustrations and GIFs.
The codeforces team is also very helpful. Our permanent team of coordinators, Nikolay KAN Kalinin and Nikolay budalnik Budin make a great contribution to the quality of the rounds.

-And I thank you for all the stories — I have already built a strong association between some pleasant emotions and Deltix:)
May your dreams come true and may the Deltix offline final be every year!