Colin Galen

Hi. Quick announcement. I used to be an organizer for a (competitive programming) contest - mBIT - hosted by my old high school. Its next iteration is roughly tomorrow. I'm not an organizer this time, but I did test (try out) the problemset - it's pretty good, and difficulty-wise, it's interesting for almost all levels.

It allows both in-person and online registration (you reading this would probably want to do online), and has cash prizes. Check it out, and consider registering!

See codeforces.com/blog/entry/129163 for full details and registration.


(as is obligatory to mention, my future plans remain consistent with my previous community posts)

10 months ago | [YT] | 165

Colin Galen

For the sake of accountability (mostly getting myself up to wake up) - for those of you here from the competitive programming world, I will be streaming my daily grind for legendary grandmaster (Codeforces). Only the first day will be on this channel, the rest will be on a new one. See codeforces.com/blog/entry/124179 for more explicit details.

1 year ago | [YT] | 290

Colin Galen

I will be doing a livestream/podcast/Q&A with my "research professor" & ICPC coach from college - we will talk about the stages of and life within competitive programming related to IOI/ICPC ("before, during, and after"). It will likely have some useful advice in it, but it will also cover some aspects of "life in competitive programming" that I have never really talked about before. Should be interesting.

It will be a livestream, i.e. interactive. You can ask things (on either channel) and we'll talk about them.

It will be (Sunday) Oct 29, 11AM ET. Here's the conversion: www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=…

My professor: Mohammad Hajiaghayi (YouTube ‪@hajiaghayi‬), IOI'97 Silver Medalist and Minker Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park

* This does not mean I will be returning to regular videos here any earlier than planned. It is its own separate thing. But this is the closest thing you'll get to content for a while probably, so enjoy it.

** "research professor" in quotes because I haven't actually started research yet :p

1 year ago (edited) | [YT] | 277

Colin Galen

A more concrete (channel) update.

First, the passive growth on the channel has been insane. Just today, the intuition video hit 1M views (yay), and we've gotten to 190K subs without my having seriously uploaded since 93K. YouTube really is crazy...

Now. I've had a lot of time to think about plans and such. First, I've realized that I won't escape competitive programming until I finally reach legendary grandmaster (on Codeforces). So that is my first priority right now until I reach it. Progress is not bad, I would consider myself around the 2800 level right now. Maybe I'll have some way of posting progress, maybe on some other channel. Or maybe not. Though, as far as competitive programming goes, LGM is all I want (e.g. ICPC is not a priority for me). So I'll be "done" after that (hopefully...).

As for YouTube, there is a lot I must do before returning to upload here. I'm far from out of ideas - there's plenty I can still do with this channel. But I want to master engagement (like, retention, e.g. watch time) before doing so, so as to give my best ideas the best possible chance to succeed in the algorithm.

This is mostly a personal decision, as engagement has been on my mind for a long time, and previously I've sort of half-assed it - there were some ideas with some humor/lightheartedness and the general idea of constantly mixing up the presentation style, but I know it's possible to do so much better. I have a particular style in mind, but I don't yet know how to execute it.

So that's where the rest of the plan comes into play - to properly learn engagement, I need to experiment and learn by actually making videos in my intended style. Likely with another channel, so that the stakes are lower and good ideas will not go to waste. It will not be relevant to this one (far from it), so I probably won't explicitly share it here, but feel free to try to find me.

So that's the idea. For now, I will focus on reaching LGM and playing with another channel to learn engagement. I will eventually return here with fresh ideas, and you will see a marked improvement in not only style, but also the presentation as a whole (if nothing else, the videos will be a lot more "fun", which is objectively an improvement for a platform like YT). It will certainly take a while to reach this point. But, nonetheless, look forward to it.

1 year ago | [YT] | 812

Colin Galen

Update on things. I will admit, I pushed myself very hard to make 100K happen. And now I've been a bit burned out, and have taken a break. I don't know exactly how long it will be. But I'll still be doing something in the downtime.

Historically, I've never really allowed myself to learn - to look at other videos, seeing what works and what doesn't, and do more than just reverse-engineering everything from the little information my analytics give me. So I'll be doing that for a while. And that means when I come back, you're gonna be seeing a lot more quality than before.

Of course, I know that a huge thing people love about my videos is the explanation style and the useful insights that are given. So those will stick around - no aspect of the quality will drop, even if the overall style will change (probably for the better).

So in short, look forward to better stuff in the future. During this time, I'll be trialing ideas via community post like I've done before. As usual, like the post if you're interested, and don't if you're not. I can't guarantee that any particular video will be made soon, but if a post gets enough support, it will almost certainly be made eventually.

And that's all. For good measure, here's an image of the playbutton (with some quality mirror face warping).

2 years ago (edited) | [YT] | 1,327

Colin Galen

Since it's apparently coming up soon, here's (a) plan for 100k: I want to tell the story of this channel, documentary-style.

Here's the lore. My first video that really blew up was a video on my journey in competitive programming. The success of that video inspired many other ones in a similar vein, and eventually my whole channel became focused on more general-style videos rather than the low-effort contest recordings I started my channel on. From there, a lot of changes and learning happened, and now we're here.

To pay a tribute to that journey video, I want to remaster it and talk about my journey on YT. For example, the rich details behind the channel's huge successes/failures, the stuff I learned and incremental changes made to each next video, the general progression toward better and better quality, etc. I will make an entertaining story out of it.

And I want to produce it with the quality and style of a documentary. If you're concerned that I've never worked with this style before, don't be. I will be taking a lot of feedback throughout, and I will also learn the general gist of storytelling and how to make good stuff. I want to make this good, and I'm a fast learner, so look forward to it.

And speaking of feedback, I will need as much help as I can get, particularly gathering opinions on why certain videos behaved the way they did (I can speculate with pretty good accuracy, but ultimately, I am not my target audience, so it would be very valuable information to get from other people) and giving general feedback on incremental versions of the video.

I will post a video about my plans soon. That will include the way to offer said feedback, and will also include more info than just this, so you should watch it even if you've seen this post :)

With all that, as always... what do you think?

2 years ago | [YT] | 453

Colin Galen

Idea: you may or may not have seen my "how to learn stuff" video, and/or my intuition video, and a lot of both of those were dealing with your unconscious mind and leveraging it to do specific tasks. Well, how about a whole video on the unconscious mind?

I'm thinking about sharing what I do to keep my unconscious mind on my side. That is, what you can do to get the more powerful and automatic/passive side of your brain (probably hundreds of times more powerful than your conscious mind) to stay focused on whatever goal you have in mind. Having done some reflection on the subject, this is very likely the reason why I can learn and improve in things so effectively, because I can focus the entirety of my raw brainpower on whatever I'm focused on.

This will be in the form of a habit - something you can do and think about for only a few minutes a day, to keep your unconscious mind focused on what you want it to do. So basically - low effort, extremely high reward. Nice, right?

What do you think?

2 years ago | [YT] | 867

Colin Galen

Another idea: I'm thinking about mental imagery. Like being able to visualize stuff in your head - how pro chess players can play dozens of games at once blindfolded or, on a lesser scale, how you can maintain an image of certain tasks/problems/ideas in your head without having to write down or draw anything.

This certainly has ties to memory, and improving this skill can likely help you in a lot of ways - for example, improving your capacity for mental visualization allows you to more easily think about complex ideas and not be limited by the space in your own mind.

If I do this, I'll probably try out a shorter video length. I'm getting slightly bored of the format I've been using, and want to try out something new.

What do you think?

2 years ago | [YT] | 929

Colin Galen

New idea: going a bit into a different realm of psych now. There is a bias that affects me and a lot of other people, ultimately leading to being unable to be happy with the achievements that you currently have (for example, a certain rating, or in general some status that you have worked for), instead being hungry for whatever's next (for example, the next-highest rating gap).

While it is certainly useful in terms of motivation for self-improvement, it can also be rather unhealthy for you. So I'm thinking of talking about it - how it works, how it affects you, and maybe how to remedy it or use it to your advantage.

What do you think?

2 years ago | [YT] | 508