How many hours of focused work per day you have? How it works for you: when you start, how and how frequently you are doing breaks, when you finish work?

It does, but it is mentally much more exhausting. My typical learning of anything with ai is iterative process of trying to rule out hallucinations and be 100% confident (60-70% of whole effort)

This is the worst, when you just got “fresh” mental model, and then you spend 3x time to understand and accept it was hallucination and apply mental force to rebuild the model.

E.g I have learned our certs (very complicated stuff with 3 different semi custom tls impl and 2 pkis) in 2 weeks. Overall flow, with all the kernel underhoods in 1 week. General flow in 1 day.

Is it faster than without AI - yes. Easier - No. Enjoyable - No.

Side note: sometimes I am fighting with AI for like 3-4 hours. It would be very interesting how much reading is it. I have gut feeling this weekly ai learning session = 1-2 technical books. So it is a lot of ai slop processing which is very tiring as well

I have worn Whoop for one month, xiaomi band (1 year), samsung watch (6 months).

My problem with that is I DON'T mostly care about "fitness" data at all. Whoop was okay for tracking sleep, but I mean, I didn't find it that useful (I don't leverage this data anyhow). It was alright to check the pulse during the boxing and sleep. that's it.

For sleep though, I have seen many researches (years ago, but still) that they are not that accurate for tracking deep/non-deep sleep cycle (which is what is really important).


I'm hypochondriac, I want HEALTH indicators, not fitness indicators. I will be happy to track PH of my stomach, and digestive system in general, some indicators in blood (forecast illness and inflammation, check hormones lvl), track symptoms (not possible mostly) etc.

In my ideal world, I would inject ton's of devices inside myself to track everything and would do daily mri. This is what I want.

This "you burned X calories, Y steps, you have Z strain" - I don't give a shit to be honest.

Tell me folks whether you are using them and whether you find them useful?

I have bunch of friends that are using WHOOP and are pretty happy with that, among useful indicators is heart performance, strain, sleep. And this "your age comparing to others" which is a bit bullshit. But for them it is good. Some of them though had an feedback that it is good for like 2-3 months and then it is useless.

Daily 355th day streak

Easy problem, not bad one. Remember, word has UNIQUE numbers, cause I started thinking initially about much more complicated algo than we need here.

https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-number-of-pushes-to-type-word-i/description/?envType=daily-question&envId=2026-07-30

#daily #easy #nopattern

Daily 356th day streak (last in the month)

Yesterday I was overthinking about solution in case there are repetitive characters, but it was too much, we had unique?

Today we have repetitive chars. Good and solid problem, pretty easy, no such crazy pattern, just very basic ones

https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-number-of-pushes-to-type-word-ii/description/?envType=daily-question&envId=2026-07-31

#daily #medium #pattern

Juicy and tasty😁 let it be snowflake next quarter please

AHAHHA, sorry, couldn't hold myself from posting this legendary meme

People were asking about the time tracking app.
This is my app, that I have vibecoded for myself.

https://tools.andreyka26.com/time-tracking

This app is only for my personal needs, so probably it won't fit your needs. That said it has all the tools that I'm usually using and trying to find elsewhere

===

It requires authorization via google.

I'm using Idle Detection API, which essentially reports whether user is active, or user is not doing anything (locked screen, went for coffee or staring at monitor for too long). https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Idle_Detection_API

This way I don't need manually pause and unpause when I go make myself coffee, or long meeting or home or whatever. I just start it in the beginning of the day and end in the end of the day. The important part to keep the tab opened (potentially I can do a native desktop clients, but I don't want to).

But remember you can vibecode it yourself, it is not that hard.

Need to explain these stats, I was talking with one guy, who is doing target, and he assumed I wanted to do a marketing campaign or something and while I was sleeping "he tried" some stuff to see how it goes.

so from 995 -> 1049 subs: these might be some random folks, and these reactions are target marketing essentially. Probably they are not real, I'm not sure how the target worked precisely.

Now it is stopped and I don't do any marketing or something. We are here for fun and growth only. I'm doing that because it makes me feel good sharing cool stuff, learning from what you share with me, and have good motivation to learn stuff (because I can share with you and get some feedback and learn even more).

And, you probably have seen I don't sell anything. The only thing I can offer: interview mock / mentorship for BigTech in case you need. But I already have bunch of people for that. So I don't want to overwork as well.

But overall I value much more the state where I can write about thing that worries me or thing I'm interested in and get some conversation. Just the fact to be listened by somebody, as being in immigration (already second country I have switched for past 4 years...) is a bit sad and lonely sometimes.

Daily 357th day

Amazing, cool problem for game theory / optimization. There are not that many such problems I have met, usually they are "Alice and Bob are playing the game".

It is hard to build mental model for, therefore I definitely recommend to figure out and solve it.

https://leetcode.com/problems/predict-the-winner/description/?envType=daily-question&envId=2026-08-01

#daily #medium #pattern #important

Small note about me getting random symptoms that disappear on its own (mostly). Just one of the examples.

This should probably explain a lot of decisions in my life:
- always have bunch of pills with me whenever I go(painkiller, anti dizziness, against poisoning, for nausea, etc etc
- always have health insurance regardless where and for how long I travel
- always check the hospitals nearby, whether they speak English etc
- always prio healthcare over anything else for choosing country for living
- always checking expiry date on everything I consume (even water, veggies, pills)

You remember we were doing Ticketmaster? https://andreyka26.com/ticketmaster-system-design-with-microsoft-engineer

For celebrity problem e.g. Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift - we had to use thirdparty waiting room or virtual queue, as you cannot scale for that at all on your own: https://developers.cloudflare.com/waiting-room/

Maybe you also remember I have mentioned that there is no detailed system design solution on the internet for that problem?? So literally, apart from some vague articles from cloudflare itself that cover 5-10% of the system - you don't have anything else than messing up with Claude and praying it does not ai slop you?

Would you like to see that System Design Solution?
Or maybe we should do something else (I'm considering Uber for now). Suggest in comments pls, your opinion is valuable.

In today's Leetcode daily challenge it is second time in my life that solution is just one return statement1. But ofc we will solve it legit and I will explain what happened

Daily 358th day streak

Exactly same as yesterday, so just copypasting yesterday's solution works.
However, if you have never seen this before it might be a bit tough

https://leetcode.com/problems/stone-game/description/?envType=daily-question&envId=2026-08-02

#daily #medium #pattern

Dublin has legit the most amazing summer in my life. Zero times I could not sleep because of a heat.

The drawback: you have to wear a jacket, if you plan go back at night

what I found, so happy humanity has invented camera at that point...... 20 years ago this guy wanted to be a Spiderman, date Mary Jane, kill Green Goblin and all of this.

Who would even think back then that he will be somewhere on the edge of EU, working as SRE for some cloud database that hadn't even been founded yet.

The more I am learning - the more I'm getting convinced how important is to have a right mental model about things.

Pretty much learning something in IT - was always about building this mental model the right way. This is what I keep doing even now. And I'm wondering, how is it in other people.

Maybe it would be fun to ask some questions about how do YOU imagine the mental model (visual entities) in your mind about something.

Let's start with simple "general ones" and then progress to more complicated software engineering ones.