Deliberate practice techniques for software developers
Books, especially technical ones, aren’t all organized the same way, so it’s good to have a plan for reading them:
Should I first try to solve the problems from Cracking the Coding interview or read the book? (answer)
I’m writing some answers on Quora this year. For more information, see A Project for 2021.
Some advice about what to do when you’re stuck on a coding puzzle: What should I do when I’m at the point where I can’t solve a competitive programming question? (answer) I’m writing some answers on Quora this year. For more information, see A Project for 2021.
ContinueVersions of this question pop up regularly on Quora. Here are my current thoughts on the topic: What is an absolute best way to become better at competitive programming? I know practice is the most important thing, but what kind of schedule would I need for this (problems a day, difficulty of problems, etc.), and […]
ContinueIf you’re interested in competitive programming, does it make sense to start with LeetCode, or should you use a traditional competitive programming platform like Codeforces or Topcoder? Is LeetCode good as a starting point for competitive programming? (answer) I’m writing some answers on Quora this year. For more information, see A Project for 2021.
ContinueLeetCode has been running a writing contest during February and March of this year. Here’s what I submitted: How to LeetCode: What I Learned from a Year of LeetCoding Challenge Problems.
ContinueProblem LeetCode 322: Coin Change (Medium) Problem Statement: You are given a set of coin denominations (integers) and an amount of change to make using only these coins. Return an integer representing the smallest number of coins sufficient to make the given amount of change. You may use as many coins of each denomination as […]
ContinueProblem LeetCode 152: Maximum Product Subarray (Medium) Problem Statement: Given an array of integers, return the largest possible product of a contiguous subarray. Some notes: A contiguous subarray is a range of values [i..j], where i and j are positions in the input array. For this problem, the subarray must contain at least one value […]
ContinueProblem LeetCode 856: Score of Parentheses (Medium) Problem Statement: You are given a string containing only the characters ( and ). The parentheses are guaranteed to be balanced (as in syntactically valid source code). Calculate a score using the following rules: () has a score of 1. AB has a score of A + B, […]
ContinueProblem LeetCode 11: Container With Most Water (Medium) Problem Statement: In the coordinate plane, consider $n$ vertical lines starting at points $(1, 0), (2, 0), …, (n, 0)$ and ending at points $(1, h_1), (2, h_2), …, (n, h_n)$, where each $h_i$ is a non-negative integer. We can construct a rectangle whose sides are the […]
ContinueProblem LeetCode 47: Permutations II (Medium) Problem Statement: Given a list of integers that may contain duplicates, return all possible unique permutations of those integers, in any order. A permutation is an arrangement of elements. For example, the three elements [1,2,3] can be arranged into $3!=6$ unique permutations: [1,2,3], [1,3,2], [2,1,3], [2,3,1], [3,1,2], and [3,2,1]. […]
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