andreyka26_se
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Hey, I'm software engineer at Microsoft, with 8+ years of experience. Here we are talking about F(M)AANG big tech interviews: leetcode, system design and corpo life.

YouTube: @andreyka26_se
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andreyka26_se
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.
Played with Maksim, the guy who responded. Amazing.

Go and get the game, let’s do full squad.
Engineering connects people😁
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Daily 362nd day streak

It took me some time to come up with nice solution, but in general, since easy - any bruteforce will fit here.

No pattern though.

https://leetcode.com/problems/smallest-divisible-digit-product-i/description/?envType=daily-question&envId=2026-08-06

#daily #easy #nopattern
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andreyka26_se
Played with Maksim, the guy who responded. Amazing. Go and get the game, let’s do full squad. Engineering connects people😁
Btw the guy is crazy. I thought I am the “early bird”, started working when I was 18, had pretty much only first year of uni and then skipped most of the stuff

But Maksim started doing freelance tasks at 16-17, and IN THE BEGINNING of the first year in uni, when he was 17 - he interviewed and got a job🤯.

Practically, he fully skipped uni. Legend. Big respect
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Yeeea, flashbacks in instagram dm. This is how all “blogging” thing and andreyka26.com started. There was no-one explaining authorization like I do: deep, with all questions and reasons behind what’s done covered, detailed step-by-step, etc

So I investigated, built, made a video and article, and in 2023 +- it got pretty high attention. But not anymore, I think now claude might explain it better, maybe. Side thing, I dont need this explanation anymore as I have RFC snapshot about oauth in my head😁
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andreyka26_se
Yeeea, flashbacks in instagram dm. This is how all “blogging” thing and andreyka26.com started. There was no-one explaining authorization like I do: deep, with all questions and reasons behind what’s done covered, detailed step-by-step, etc So I investigated…
Btw yea, most of the “protocol” things are amazingly explained in rfc, with “official” terminology and stuff.

Whenever you have discussion with someone, your argument: “this is rfc confirming my point” - is killer-argument.

Applies to http, dns, and whole tcp/ip stack, oauth/oidc(not really on rfc but has official doc), etc

I made so many people crazy with “jwt with login+password is insecure antipattern discouraged, by OAuth rfc literally”😁
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Seen post like MB/s vs Mb/s, and the difference.
Well actually there are more😁

Mebibits - bits in binary 1024 format
Mebibyte - bytes in binary 1024 format
Megabit - bits in decimal 1000 format
Megabyte - bytes in decimal 1000 format
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Btw interview round “to check your AI usage, agentic development approaches” is already a thing that exists or getting onboarded to hiring process.

So learn how to properly use agents. This is now not an engineering skill, but interview skill as well
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andreyka26_se
Btw interview round “to check your AI usage, agentic development approaches” is already a thing that exists or getting onboarded to hiring process. So learn how to properly use agents. This is now not an engineering skill, but interview skill as well
For me it is like that as well. I am very poor user of agents tbh.
I just say to them what to do and then swearing that they didn’t do what I said until they do.😁 Sometimes I do it in plan mode.

Sometimes I am writing skill (we have bunch of skills at my job). They might be helpful.
I have heard about spec driven, but people say it is hard to maintain specs

I was mostly reading claude/cursor off docs


===

Share your findings, and “tricks”/development setups and approaches?
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Fuck AI first projects.
Now I have to deep diving into this shit for 10 hours today that has been vibecoded, because it suddenly stopped working and now 5 engineers don’t know why.

This is what happens, when you dont have code ownership(or your app is crud trivial shit, which is not our case at all)

Fuck ai. I want ai to disappear, to be forbidden in software engineering (except frontend)
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andreyka26_se
Fuck AI first projects. Now I have to deep diving into this shit for 10 hours today that has been vibecoded, because it suddenly stopped working and now 5 engineers don’t know why. This is what happens, when you dont have code ownership(or your app is crud…
And investigating with AI is crazy exhausting if it is unknown thing.

I self reflected why. With ai, anything it told me can be hallucinations and false. So after asking 5-6 questions about how it works and what can be the root cause - you have tons of combinations of which of these might be false.

And therefore it is painful to even try to ground up your conclusions on these AI answers. Or if you do it, you wasted 1 hour to build it up, and then you realize, well, motherfucker hallucinated, now I need to unlearn, and build the opposite mental model and ground up different conclusions on top.
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andreyka26_se
And investigating with AI is crazy exhausting if it is unknown thing. I self reflected why. With ai, anything it told me can be hallucinations and false. So after asking 5-6 questions about how it works and what can be the root cause - you have tons of combinations…
Literally the same conversation (the fucker has access to all the skills, logs, mcps)

“Are these the connection of type A”?

- yes

(Opening different chat and somehow realize they are type B)
(Going back to original chat)

“OR MAYBE THEY ARE FUCKING CONNECTION OF TYPE B??????”

- yes they are connection type B


????????
????????????????????????
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Sorry, I gonna check all the comments by the end of the day.

Guess who is working all weekends for this AI shit? Yes, Andrii is working…


For daily leetcode - yesterday was skippable stuff. Pretty complicated thing without much patterns. For today I will post
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I am sometimes rethinking life choices, as for now I could have recorded videos from inside of that office😁

Not now, but someday folks, I WILL record from that office. Take a screenshot.
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Daily 363d day streak (yesterday)

Extremely complicated codeforces shit + didn't have time yesterday. No patterns pretty much. I would recommend to skip.

https://leetcode.com/problems/smallest-divisible-digit-product-ii/description/?envType=daily-question&envId=2026-08-08

#daily #hard #nopattern
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Daily 364th day streak

Not bad problem, pretty unique in a sense, never seen such intuition behind it.

https://leetcode.com/problems/find-the-lexicographically-smallest-valid-sequence/description/?envType=daily-question&envId=2026-08-08

#daily #medium #pattern
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This is brilliant.
Yes, it is a tradeoff as in basic computer science:
- you have quick writes but long reads
- you have slow writes but long reads

That's it. And I was always respecting people and projects that respect other's time and make bigger effort on write (the code) so that it is much quicker to get the mental model when other 15+ colleagues are reading the code
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andreyka26_se
This is brilliant. Yes, it is a tradeoff as in basic computer science: - you have quick writes but long reads - you have slow writes but long reads That's it. And I was always respecting people and projects that respect other's time and make bigger effort…
this is exactly what happened with our AI proj at Snowflake.
The code was pushed quicker than people can track it and save it to brain.

Now the complexity is too high to comprehend. And now human either asks LLM to fix the error and prays, or needs 2 weeks to understand how shit works (still with ai, cause you fucking cannot read 2-3k lines of rust function)
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andreyka26_se
this is exactly what happened with our AI proj at Snowflake. The code was pushed quicker than people can track it and save it to brain. Now the complexity is too high to comprehend. And now human either asks LLM to fix the error and prays, or needs 2 weeks…
I'm not joking about 2 weeks.
I had to do knowledge share about our CRAZY COMPLICATED THE HARDEST TO COMPREHEND IN MY LIFE custom PKI/Certificates.

took me 2 weeks to draw down the excalidraw diagrams. It was seen during the meeting people didn't understand shit out of my talk about certs (however it was crazy distilled, easy-to-read-hard-to-write snapshot of things).

I already see how beautiful the oncall will be for that thing😁
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