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.

First q, how do you imagine year and months?
This is my representation. This is literally what I "see" every time I'm thinking about what month is it right now and when am I.

It always starts with Autumn (probably because of school). It always has specific separator in Dec-Jan. Somehow Spring is "less important" than Winter and Summer.

Share your ones

Some of you have seen the article. But there is a video as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApSbjuVHAR8&t=962s

Daily 359th day streak

Don't be scared, if you have solved yesterday's and the day before yesterday's problems - it should be easy-mid for you.

The problem is good, it has a pattern, game theory + dp. Amazing one, definitely recommended.

https://leetcode.com/problems/stone-game-iii/description/?envType=daily-question&envId=2026-08-03

#daily #hard #pattern

Dealing with stock broker application is always "amazing"/strange experience.

Now I wanted to fill some form, it shown me an error. Then I got phone call (automated from US) with the message: "Hey, there was an application error, good bye"🗿🗿🗿

Daily 360th day streak

Easy one, for 2 mins coding. Go for it. However no pattern is here.

https://leetcode.com/problems/find-missing-elements/description/?envType=daily-question&envId=2026-08-04

#daily #easy #nopattern

Met Mr Orange’s brother

Daily 361st day streak.

Amazing graph problem. You know I like them, not a bullshit one. Nice patterns can be used. Not really hard

Description here is a bit complicated - check the comments, I will explain

https://leetcode.com/problems/remove-methods-from-project/?envType=daily-question&envId=2026-08-05

#daily #medium #pattern

Your blogger got hooked today, sorry..(

Btw anyone is playing battlefield 1 multiplayer? I am playing with my friend, but it is just 2 of us. Would be great to have full party 5 people and smash everyone.

Small dinner for two of us, and lets call it a day

Oh my god I got so many clowns in threads that try to educate me on async/await in js and in general in other languages

So the question:
What is async/await, why is it used?
You can answer for your language as it will be a bit different according to thread model that is used in it.

Throw few words below

Would you be interested in article about async await in differential languages, literally underhood / hardware level?

I have notes for that, as 2018-2022 I was doing a lot of outsource companies interviews, and I learnt it very low level for .net/c#, js and python.
Seems like a pretty confusing topic.

Not sure it is needed that much nowadays with ai to be honest.