Cal Newport likes to distill the components of productivity into the following formula: Work Accomplished = Time Spent x Intensity We all have 24 hours per day, excluding the occasional leap second. That plus the need for sleep puts an upper limit on the Time Spent component of the formula. Intensity, in theory, has no […]
ContinueThe Trouble With Books
I love the idea of books. Years ago, I used to browse in bookstores. I bought paper copies of some of the books I looked at, and read some of the books I bought. Once Amazon came along, I clicked around their suggested items list for ideas. These days, I keep an Amazon wish list […]
ContinueBinary Search the Answer for UVa 11413 and UVa 12032
In the Divide and Conquer section of uHunt Chapter 3, one of the subsections is called Binary Search the Answer. Here’s how that technique works. For a binary search problem like UVa 12192, the data to search is the input data. For that problem, you are given a rectangular grid of integers, and your goal […]
ContinueA Career Skill: Organizing Information
Another session of Top Performer is underway, and one of the goals of the early lessons is finding a skill that is important for success in your career. That has me thinking about skills for programmers. Today I’m going to focus on one particular skill that is critical for programmers working on a team, and […]
ContinueA Summer Learning Plan
We have arrived at that time of the year when students leave behind their regular academic schedules and take up summer activities like bike riding, taking long walks on the beach, and learning competitive programming. Last week, a reader sent me an email asking for advice on the best way to spend two months practicing […]
ContinueLearning How to Learn Competitive Programming
Last week, Quora hosted a session with Barbara Oakley, one of the two instructors for Learning How to Learn, “the world’s largest online course.” During the Quora session, people asked her questions about learning techniques, public speaking, online courses, and other topics. I took the Learning How to Learn class when it was first offered […]
ContinueLearning From Local Experts
There’s a certain kind of programming problem that you won’t find the solution to on Stack Overflow, programming blogs, or even an old-fashioned paper book. It’s the kind of problem that is, to use an old Stack Overflow term, too localized. Imagine you’re working on a software team and you encounter one of the following […]
Continue4 Lessons From a Competitive Programming Problem
Last week, I wrote an editorial for UVa 12192: Grapevine. I thought some more about the experience of solving it, and came up with four lessons that apply to competitive programming problem-solving.
ContinueAdapting Binary Search for UVa 12192
Last week, I wrote about the benefits of carefully studying even simple algorithms like binary search, which provides a fast way to find an element in a sorted array. Once you understand how that algorithm works, you can adapt it to solve other problems. For example: Given an array of integers and an integer L, […]
ContinueVisualizing Binary Search
uHunt Chapter 3 has six starred problems, and many more problems in total, on the topic of binary search. If you want to solve them, it helps to have a firm grasp of how that algorithm works. The binary search algorithm is conceptually simple. In ancient times, like the early 1990’s, people used it instinctively […]
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