Daily (286/373 streak until LC cap)

Again top 100 first LeetCode questions. If you are into leetcode - it should be already solved by you. Not bad binary search problem, a bit annoying.

https://leetcode.com/problems/search-in-rotated-sorted-array/description/?envType=daily-question&envId=2026-05-22

#daily #medium #pattern

Here we go. If you hire too strong and clever people (ex-Google staffs) -> this happens. I'm trying to understand things over design docs + ai to start doing at least something. But it is so complicated and I'm missing so much background. The senior folks are just spamming PRs. Only after one week I can at least have an idea what some PRs are doing.

Right now, I'm fully stuck with certificates/cryptography as owned CA and bunch of some crypto algos are used.

So, for now I'm going to cover a bit of cryptography background: TLS/mTLS, bunch of algos worked on symmetric keys, how they are derived etc.

Will post here, maybe somebody will find it useful.

Question for now. Do you know how client validates TLS certificate presented by browser? and why self signed certificate won't be trusted? I mean, can you explain with tech details.

You might wonder - why do I need to know TLS, RSA, chain of trust, etc under hood? Explaining:

At Microsoft I had a colleague, extremely intelligent guy, much cleverer than me. Once he was interviewing the candidate that had CV with "EVERY SINGLE TECHNOLOGY POSSIBLE" mentioned along with HTTPS/TLS.

My friend fucked him up so bad about TLS, chain of trust etc, probably the guy got trauma even from what I have heard XD.

I don't support that, my friend just didn't like this idea of CV. If you ever mention HTTPS/TLS in CV - make sure you check my next post😁

Since I'm not writing code except Leetcode: would you like to see the stream of writing something old-fashioned way:
- zero these fucking agents
- zero ai autocomplete
- (optionally) zero asking questions to ai, only google and stackoverflow + manuals
- only vim motions, only IDE


Now for learning I'm going to write my PKI system to basically "touch" stuff for building the mental model. We can do it on stream, or maybe implement something system design related / networks related.

Thumbup/thumpdown for voting

wow 36 likes, I see.

Will plan some stream live coding. For now I'm thinking about custom PKI and TLS/mTLS implementation. Feel free to add something in the comment section, they we'll do voting as always

Daily (287/373 streak until LC cap)

I wouldn't say it is easy if not solving with bruteforce, but interesting problem

https://leetcode.com/problems/check-if-array-is-sorted-and-rotated/description/?envType=daily-question&envId=2026-05-23

#daily #easy #nopattern

Daily (288/373 streak until LC cap)

Actually not hard at all. I would rate medium, very good question. Go for it (intuition helper in the comments along with the solution).

https://leetcode.com/problems/jump-game-v/description/?envType=daily-question&envId=2026-05-24

#daily #hard #pattern

Sunday’s piece of “life” in “work life balance”

Daily (289/373 streak until LC cap)

Pretty hard problem, not medium IMO. Pretty unique intuition, never seen something like that.

p.s. don't try dp -> it is too slow for this

https://leetcode.com/problems/jump-game-vii/description/?envType=daily-question&envId=2026-05-25

#daily #medium

Recently saw a thread, where person was asking about git commands on the interview.

I am the guy, who is 8 years in industry, I am deving with vim only (or at least vim motions), but I literally wouldnt even remember how to stage + commit with git commands.
Besides that, I never rebased, because I am afraid of missing some commits and merge conflicts - so always merge from main -> and squash on merge to main.

At some point, I will learn, I promise.

Creating - no, but using, and be pretty proficient with ai workflows, know skills, rules, specbased - definitely yes, without exclusion. It is everywhere.
I personally dont write code, full vibe code + review.
I dont even open pr in git, ai does it.

1 year, and 2 days ago 😎

I think maybe I should push for 1k, just to flex even more😆😆😆

Daily (290/373 streak until LC cap)

Pretty easy, go for it.

https://leetcode.com/problems/count-the-number-of-special-characters-i/description/?envType=daily-question&envId=2026-05-26

#daily #easy #pattern

I remember, I was fake senior at Epam already, at 20. My uni friends decided to go for university olympiad algos contest. They also are seniors as well (it was gold era in Ukraine for swe)

Some 13-15 years old kids were also participating…

It was similar experience to first sparring with Candidate for Master of Sports when I started doing boxing.

These kids fucked us up soooo hard. They have completed 5 problems, by the time we had solved one and had been on our way to solve the second😆😆😆

After this, my ego got deep trauma I realised, it is not my thing, so my peak is some average hard leetcode problem with 40+ acceptance. This is peak. I am still pretty bad at it to be honest.

Daily (291/373 streak until LC cap)

not bad daily, not hard, just regular medium

https://leetcode.com/problems/count-the-number-of-special-characters-ii/description/?envType=daily-question&envId=2026-05-27

#daily #medium

https://www.snowflake.com/en/news/press-releases/snowflake-expands-aws-collaboration-with-6b-commitment-to-accelerate-enterprise-agentic-ai-adoption/


My guess, but I am way too incompetent in stock market dynamics and laws..

Joking. Of course this is because I stayed late nights, learned all the cryptography for one project and educated people about it so no one makes mistakes.

Daily (292/373 streak until LC cap)

Amazing problem, it is not hard actually, I would rate as mid. I had this leetcode pattern in my real interview for big tech, therefore highly recommended.

https://leetcode.com/problems/longest-common-suffix-queries/?envType=daily-question&envId=2026-05-30

#daily #hard #pattern #recommend