Cracking the Coding Interview

Missing Two

Usually my youngest son calls on his way to work. Is almost 10:00 AM and have not heard from him. I work from home so I am able to receive his calls pretty much any time. I do not like to call him because he works out in the mornings and has to go home, get ready and drive to work. His time varies from day to day. We have this unspoken arrangement that if he does not have a chance to call we will do so the next day.

The arrangement is exactly the opposite on weekends. I tend to call him as soon as my wife and I head out for the first activity of the day. Typically is on our way to or from shopping for groceries or running any other morning errand. Continue reading “Missing Two”

Re-Space

UPDATE – The format for the code for the class TrieNode has been addressed. Sorry for the inconvenience.

It is Friday and my youngest and family will be arriving this afternoon for a weekend long visit. My wife and I are getting ready for their arrival later today. We all enjoy good food so we have an extensive menu planned which includes fugazza, pasta carbonara with lots of pancetta, beef roast with a homemade tomato sauce, limoncello cake and different alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages.

Let’s get to the main subject of this post. I tackled problem 17.13 from the Cracking the Coding Interview book. The problem is name Re-Space. Continue reading “Re-Space”

Missing Number

It is Friday and it has been a long week and I am feeling somewhat tired. My wife and I have been invited for dinner at one of her brother’s house. I am looking forward to decompress later today.

In this post I tackled problem 17.4 from the Cracking the Coding Interview book by Gayle Laakmann McDowell. As usual I read the problem a few times to get a good understanding of what is required. Given that I have to generate the test scaffolding I try to be even more careful not to waste time. Continue reading “Missing Number”

Add without Plus

It is Thursday in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul and the sun is shining. Later this afternoon my wife and I will go walking for an hour. Not too many days left before it gets really cold and start to snow.

After doing the last HackerRank challenge which was rated easy I decided to go back to the “Cracking the Coding Interview” book by Gayle Laakmann McDowell and start tackling the hard problems listed in chapter 17 of the book. Continue reading “Add without Plus”

BST Operations

It is a Saturday morning in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. It rained last night. Hopefully the day will be dry. I am planning on cooking chicken wings in the gas grill on the deck. There are not too many warm days left to use the grill this season.

A few days ago I started reading chapter four from “Cracking the Coding Interview” by Gayle Laakmann McDowell. For some reason I diverted to adding and deleting values from a BST. I always like to find how others approached the problem. I started watching some videos and reading some articles on the web. Several of the algorithms were convoluted and they seem to fail with different values. So I decided to write some code which seems to work as expected. If you give it a try and find issues please let me know. Continue reading “BST Operations”

Stack Min

It is Monday evening. Yesterday, with the help of my wife we cleaned a spot in my home office and put together the 4K monitor and computer. Later I set up the computer. The monitor is impressive. The only this missing for today is to connect the Azure Kinect DK and start experimenting.

Today I solved (at least I think) the 3.2 question Stack Min from the book “Cracking the Coding Interview”. The question follows: “How would you design a stack which, in addition to push and pop, has a function min which returns the minimum element. As I am reading the question I want to state that when I was solving the problem, I agreed with the imaginary interviewer that min function would return the min value. We could also have the solution return the minimum element (the actual node), but we decided that that was not the scope of the question. Continue reading “Stack Min”

Stack and Queue

I will start this post today and will finish it tomorrow. Today I received the 4K monitor that I ordered last week from Dell. The box looks like it is for a regular flat screen TV. My wife and I moved it downstairs. I will open the box over the weekend. Hopefully the new computer will arrive before the end of the weekend.

Tomorrow came and went. My wife had a dentist appointment, we had to stop by my son’s place and finally we stopped at the grocery store. When we got home it was past 06:00 PM. We go to sleep shortly after 07:00 PM so we sat down in the living room and chatted. Continue reading “Stack and Queue”

IsUnique2

It is Wednesday evening and the high for the day was about 72F in Apple Valley, MN. The good thing is that most of the day was sunny and as far as I can tell there was no rain. The Minnesota State Fair is going on but my wife and I seldom attend the event.

I received the Azure Kinect DK arrived this afternoon. The box was delivered by FedEx to our next door neighbor. He was home because some workers were replacing his gutters. When he read the label he stopped by and delivered the package. He mentioned that it was interesting that the delivery person did not check the address which was perfectly readable on the box label. Continue reading “IsUnique2”

BST Search

It is a Saturday in August in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul and it is going to be a warm and humid day. My wife is out shopping with a friend and I am in my home office having fun with Binary Search Trees (BSTs).

This past week I was talking with a software engineer about coding interviews. I have mixed thoughts about them. Not sure about their value as far as finding out if a person is able to develop quality software. Allow me to describe the process which seems to be quite spread around the industry.

The candidate is interviewed by multiple technical people. The idea is to present the candidate with a set of one or more programming problems and expect working code written on a whiteboard. Typically the programming language of choice is up to the candidate. Continue reading “BST Search”