Today is drop.
I promised myself in the morning that I'm not leaving office until I'm finished.
I'm finished. Going home and will deploy

28 pages of nerdish text about why everyone around is wrong😁😁😁😁

https://andreyka26.com/messenger-system-design-is-wrong

Eventually, after 1 month, I did it 😁

Please share your thoughts. It is just article that explains the problem but does not have a solution

#systemdesign

Daily (246/373 streak until LC cap)

Good problem to remind yourself DP. Not hard tbh (at least topdown)

https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-distance-to-type-a-word-using-two-fingers/description/?envType=daily-question&envId=2026-04-12

#daily #hard #pattern

Daily (247/373 streak until LC cap)

For tomorrow. Easy problem for 1 min, go and collect the coin

https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-distance-to-the-target-element/description/?envType=daily-question&envId=2026-04-13

#daily #easy #nopattern

Daily (248/373 streak until LC cap)

Interesting problem, but pretty hard to come up with DP recursion here, wasn't intuitive for me.

https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-total-distance-traveled/description/?envType=daily-question&envId=2026-04-15

#daily #hard #pattern

Daily (249/373 streak until LC cap)

Nice and easy problem, no specific pattern, 2 mins coding.

https://leetcode.com/problems/shortest-distance-to-target-string-in-a-circular-array/description/?envType=daily-question&envId=2026-04-15

#daily #easy

Daily (250/373 streak until LC cap)

Not bad and not that hard, but a bit puzzling with indices of indices xD

https://leetcode.com/problems/closest-equal-element-queries/description/?envType=daily-question&envId=2026-04-16

#daily #medium

Let's go😎

Okay, slowly but surely, I am getting more annoyed by snowflake 😁

I definitely like my prev project at MS more. Will think what I can tell about it and stay in boundary of nda.

)

I'm very surprised.
So imagine, some guy read the article, clicked on the "system design" category, found out that it does not work, found the repo for github pages, figured out what's not working, created fix PR, and it worked.
Then guy found me on instagram and pinged me to take a look.

Very nice surprise tbh, thanks @thisizaro.

Daily (251/373 streak until LC cap)

Nice medium problem. Actually there is pattern, that solves this problem, I have seen it in other good problems, so I would recommend to solve this one.

https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-absolute-distance-between-mirror-pairs/description/?envType=daily-question&envId=2026-04-17

#daily #medium

Daily (252/373 streak until LC cap)

Easy one, just simulate what is stated.

https://leetcode.com/problems/mirror-distance-of-an-integer/description/?envType=daily-question&envId=2026-04-18

#daily #easy #nopattern

Don't believe it can replace software engineers completely in cases like:
- company/project cares about reputation
- big not maintainable projects

===

In case of reputation - no company would ever trust AI doing highly important incidents mitigation, rollouts, etc. We are paid for taking responsibility and being able to act intelligently

For large projects, it is quite visible that it usually proposes bad approaches for bug fixes, and feature implementations that are either redundantly complicated or impossible at all.

Besides that, recently I needed to do some calculations about infra cost. This shit, that had access to all necessary info estimated it wrongly that was spotted by senior. So whenever there is a need for precise answers, like HOW MUCH it costs us, IS IT POSSIBLE TO DO X,Y,Z - AI cannot say for sure in large projects.

===

Market will be bad, there might be salary degradation and juniors might be out of market completely though

It is quite interesting dynamic, that very often managers want to hear precise estimations in money, time for some feature, or is it possible to do some feature. The problem with AI that no engineer has ownership and mental model for that, and it is typical that now engineers spend 10x time to confirm some hypothesis, estimation, etc.

So apart from performance boost from NOT writing the code, we got performance degradation in understanding and making decisions. Time will show how bad it is.

For small projects, POCs, etc you don't even need understanding. I have built apps for myself (tools.andreyka26.com, syncsymptom.com) in vibecode mode except deploying it manually to my vm. I don't really know how it works, except some parts, like how auth is built, what are the frameworks, storages, and what is general basic architecture that I want.

But again, I can afford it, because I don't care, I'm the only customer, and it was quite a lot of times that it erased some feature, or broke some page, or something else. I just don't give a shit, but on the scale of Snowflake, Microsoft, Google -> they will lose millions because of that, if this is the approach.

THE MOST FUCKING ANNOYING type of companies are US stock companies.

whatever you want to do extra - you fucking need to call them (an be charged by that). Change phone number? - call them, change address - call them, troubles with registration/auth - call them.

I fucking hate calling people in general. Humanity came up with email, messengers, sms, what is the purpose of calling are they just previous ERA or is it security? They don't know my voice, however I'm fucking stating the security codes and other shit outloud for everyone else who can hear me.

and specifically the "benefits" team works only business days, amazing. Sorry but I don't understand it at all.

Daily (253/373 streak until LC cap)

Amazing problem, tests well known leetcode pattern. Recommended, and it is not very hard.

https://leetcode.com/problems/maximum-distance-between-a-pair-of-values/description/?envType=daily-question&envId=2026-04-19

#daily #medium #pattern

Rest day today