Blog

Coding, reflecting, evolving.

Spirit Beads: Engineering a Boutique E-Commerce Platform

2025 December 25th

E-Commerce Development | December 2025 - Present

Oracle Release Management

2025 October 1st

Applications Developer 2 | April 2024 - September 2025

LeetCode 32. Longest Valid Parantheses

2025 May 3rd

I went through a period of intense study, focusing on solving problems with C++. Now, I'm back to Python and happy to walk through this solution to longest valid parantheses.

LeetCode 1004. Max Consecutive Ones III

2025 February 13th

I completed the LeetCode 150! Since then, I haven't stopped practicing. I want to master common algorithms and feel confident for future interviews. ___ For this problem, I started with this greedy solution. We always flip a zero if we haven't done…

LeetCode 120. Triangle

2025 January 21st

Today I start working on multidimensional DP. I expect these problems to require a dynamicly-sized array to build a solution, rather than a static number of variables. I chose to write about this problem because it is a great example of how we can…

LeetCode 34. Find First and Last Position of Element in Sorted Array

2025 January 7th

We're working through binary search problems. This one has an initial solution with many lines duplicated. We further work the solution to use a function and a boolean variable to make the code more clean via the DRY principle.

LeetCode 207. Course Schedule

2024 December 28th

Today I worked on a general graph problem. My initial solution was much more verbose and less readable than another coder's solution. However, I feel like during an interview I would have been able to derive the simpler solution through asking…

LeetCode 22. Generate Parentheses

2024 December 25th

Here's another backtracking problem. For this post, I'd like to discuss the differences between my solution and another submitted solution.

LeetCode 77. Combinations

2024 December 21st

I've been working on backtracking problems. For this one, it helped to visualize the recursion stack using Python Tutor. Also, I will have to revisit this later as the complexity analysis is out-of-the-ordinary.

LeetCode 133. Clone Graph

2024 December 18th

This problem stumped me for a while because I needed to use a dictionary to make sure I didn't have duplicate copies, then I also forgot to return the copy at the end of the DFS algorithm.

LeetCode 173. Binary Search Tree Iterator

2024 December 14th

Here are two solutions. One is recursive and the other iterative. The iterative solution is better as it can handle larger inputs.

LeetCode 103. Binary Tree Zigzag Level Order Traversal

2024 December 12th

I am glad I was able to make a solution from my own intuition.

LeetCode 236. Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree

2024 December 5th

This is the last month of my goal toward 150 problems done by 2025. I'll have to pick up more than a few problems this weekend. I have 56 problems remaining.

LeetCode 105. Construct Binary Tree from Preoder and Inorder Traversal

2024 November 28th

Happy Thanksgiving! I am happy to have solved this without looking up a solution. However, I did have to review traversals.

LeetCode 146. LRU Cache

2024 November 26th

This took me a few days although it's only a medium! It is important to remember Python is pass-by-reference. I spent a lot of time debugging because I didn't mirror changes between previous and next nodes when moving a node between them. I was able…

LeetCode 86. Partition List

2024 November 23rd

I had to read the comments to understand this problem. I didn't understand how they wanted the ordering until I read a few examples.

LeetCode 82. Remove Duplicates from Sorted List II

2024 November 21st

The trick for this one was tracking duplicates via the unique boolean and a pending variable.

LeetCode 100. Same Tree

2024 November 20th

Today I chose an easy problem since I had a late day at work and gym afterwards.

LeetCode 25. Reverse Nodes in k-Group

2024 November 19th

I had difficulties with this problem with terminating completed lists. I was surprised that ChatGPT didn't give this simple solution, it suggested a large rework. I'll have to be mindful before implementing all of ChatGPT's suggestions.

LeetCode 92. Reverse Linked List II

2024 November 18th

I was able to reduce this time complexity from O(n) = 2n to O(n) = n by using a list for the elements to be reversed, and then only modifying those rather than stepping through all nodes while reversing.

LeetCode 138. Copy List with Random Pointer

2024 November 15th

This problem was tricky as I had to track Node references rather than the index given in the input.

LeetCode 224. Basic Calculator

2024 November 14th

Final stack problem for this practice set is a hard question. Took me an hour and a half to come up with this convoluted method. Parsing numbers character by character was my first mistake.

LeetCode 150. Evaluate Reverse Polish Notation

2024 November 13th

Now I'm on to stacks. I had to rethink my strategy of going from right to left, to left to right. I was overcomplicating it.

LeetCode 57. Insert Interval

2024 November 12th

This took me a long time to cover all cases.

LeetCode 56. Merge Intervals

2024 November 11th

Now I'm onto intervals. This one merges all intersecting intervals and returns the distinct items.

LeetCode 49. Group Anagrams

2024 November 9th

Working on hashmap problems now.

LeetCode 289. Game of Life

2024 November 6th

Final matrix problem, this one a bit special to me. My first repo in Github is for a Game of Life program in C++. I created it in 2011 as a science fair project.

LeetCode 48. Rotate Image

2024 November 5th

Working through more matrix problems today.

LeetCode 36. Valid Sudoku

2024 November 4th

Now, I am working on matrix problems.

LeetCode 76. Minimum Window Substring

2024 November 3rd

Last problem for this study set's sliding window problems.

LeetCode 30. Substring with Concatenation of All Words

2024 November 2nd

Starting with a hard problem today.

LeetCode 68. Text Justification

2024 November 1st

This took a while to solve. I completed it over two days, then I had the help of ChatGPT to analyze the complexity. I reviewed other answers and I didn't find simpler methods.

LeetCode 28. Find the Index of the First Occurrence in a String

2024 October 31st

This was an easy problem.

LeetCode 6. Zigzag Conversion

2024 October 30th

This one took me about 15 minutes to come up with a solution. I then worked through it with this naive solution.

LeetCode 12. Integer to Roman

2024 October 28th

I started feeling down about my past interview performance. Rather than continue ruminating, I decided to continue my LeetCode grind tonight. My goal is to complete the Top 150 Interview Questions before the end of the year.

LeetCode 12. Integer to Roman

2024 October 28th

Finished a couple easy problems, then this medium problem. I feel like this was made easier by python's list slicing.

LeetCode 74. Search a 2D Matrix

2024 October 22nd

Getting back into the habit of solving LeetCode problems.

Learning Terraform

2024 October 15th

The intial phone screen for the StubHub interview went well. I was asked about my experience with Terraform. I admitted that I have only used it once before. and it has been many years since then. However, I used AWS CDK frequently at my last job…

Email Processing System Design

2024 October 13th

I'm looking forward to an interview for a software engineer position at StubHub. It offers work with microservices, kubernetes, and cloud-native technologies. The position focuses on DevOps, such as infrastructure, build, deployment, and artifact…

Scholarships Plus

2024 October 8th

I've began a new project, scholarships-plus. This will be a CRUD app for tracking and improving scholarship essays.

Intro to Cursor

2024 October 7th

Today I decided to embrace the AI revolution and try out Cursor. I'm going to write a quick LeetCode solution, then dive into some project ideas.

Another LeetCode Blog Post

2024 October 6th

We're solving another LeetCode problem today. Tomorrow I will add my new project. Let's dive in.

LeetCode 191. Number of 1 Bits

2024 October 5th

We're solving another LeetCode problem today instead of adding a new project to my portfolio. This one is focused on bit manipulation. Let's dive in.

LeetCode 190. Reverse Bits

2024 October 4th

Review The code is clean and concise. We used descriptive variable names. We have implemented a bit manipulation. We can test our code using the examples provided. n = 43261596 b = '0b10100101000001111010011100' s =…

LeetCode 35. Search Insert Position

2024 October 3rd

You must write an algorithm with O(log n) runtime complexity.

Amazon.com Data Catalog

2024 May 1st

Software Development Engineer | August 2022 - April 2024

Yelp Shops

2023 January 1st

iOS & Web Development | September 2022 - December 2022

Remove Zone:Identifier Files

2022 October 9th

To remove the Zone:Identifier files, execute:

Working for The Future

2022 October 9th

As we transition into the professional world, we are faced with many questions. How much do we save for retirement? Would you like to split your check? Are you successful?