Log Entry : 17/10/2015

Okay, I decided writing logs a few days back but I am starting now. I guess it's much better than tweeting all day around; although I still like tweeting a lot.

So, today I slept a few extra hours, but it was amazing so to see so many dreams. I mean I felt good after I woke up, actually someone else woke me up. I had started playing a game of basketball, and a throw from one of my teammate was there, and I missed it. And then I woke up. But I am going to play basketball in the coming days for it's all holidays around. Atleast I am thinking of that.

Yesterday, I spent most of my time, actually all of it, trying to implement  closest pair of points problem. Right now I suck at implementing C++, note to myself to improve on that. But hey, it felt great after I got my answer for the first time. I played music and sang for the next half an hour. Crazy me!! Although I ma yet to know why the algorithm takes 7 as its limit. I will open up and hopefully close this mystery today only.

Also, I have come up, accidentally only, with a very very great idea to make me remember that I need to do competitive programming. No, I am not going to disclose it unless it becomes successful. But remember Sandeep Maheshwari, he told that to eat less, he made a cut in his plate that said "32". I just did something like that. I also changed the wallpaper of my lappy to the file where I wrote what I need to do today. I am thinking of doing it everyday. Keeps me away from all the hassle of thinking of things that I won't be doing right now, and hindering me in doing things that I am indulged in at the moment.

Other than that, I was just waiting for a meeting. Got delayed by about half an hour. So, I thought why not write my first log entry. Yeah, and here it is.

This week of mine : Goldman Sachs internship preparation ends

Okay, so a few hours before, the result for the aptitude test of Goldman Sachs was given, and I couldn't clear that. And yeah, that's bad and I can spend a good amount of time from now on, sitting idle and feeling bad about that, or I could just focus on what went wrong, and deliver my best to be much better the next time.

So, what went wrong? Well, everything. I couldn't solve more than 5 questions out of the given 15 general aptitude questions on my own, and that's really bad. And I mean it.

But there is no point being sad about that. The thing is such aptitude tests have always given me hard time when given to solve in a restricted amount of time. It's not like that I can't solve that. The problem with me is to have the speed and accuracy at the same time, where my speed has always knocked me down.

And the other thing, for which I guess I am pretty much upset from myself, is that only 4 out 20 test cases could pass for the only coding question that was given to us. The problem I see here is I need to be faster. Faster in coming up with a good algorithm, faster in implementing that. Because the problem is I had no time to generate my own test cases, which might have reflected why my answer was failing for so many test cases.

So, finally all boils down to practice, practice and practice.

To prepare for aptitude tests, I was looking at the answers given here.

And the answers seems to point to good resources. Do comment if you know of some other awesome resources to prepare for general aptitude tests.

Then remains the part of coding questions. Well, I think I am doing good in this area. I regularly solve questions, and in some time I will be fast enough to have spare time to have a good look at it once again.

At last I am ending this post with a part of one quote that happens to be my inspiration all the time.

If you know what you're worth, then go out and get what you're worth.

And I know what I'm worth of :)
    

Helpful links for various computer science courses.

Formal languages and automata :

• http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/162/

Strategy and Board Game Programming :

• http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/180a/

Resources for Competitive Programming

This is a live post where I continue to add the resources that I find useful.

Bit Manipulation:

• https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html
• http://bits.stephan-brumme.com/

Slides for programming contest discussions : http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/aca/lop12/

Codeforces blog posts : http://codeforces.com/blog/entry/13529

Another great resource ~ http://e-maxx.ru/



IIITH resources :

• https://threads-iiith.quora.com
• http://codeforces.com/blog/darkshadows

Implementation of algorithms :

• http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/161/  ~ I liked the implementation of Dijkstra given in python.

Quora answers : 

Java related post.

IO in Java

• http://www.cpe.ku.ac.th/~jim/java-io.html
• http://codeforces.com/blog/entry/7018

Interview practice :

• http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-way-to-answer-describe-yourself-in-an-interview?share=1

Java Interview Questions :

• http://www.javatpoint.com/corejava-interview-questions

What computer science things I am going to learn in the next 2 years ?

Although I study in a college, but most of the times, I consider myself as a self-taught programmer, who learns from the net along with his friends, and don't bother to depend on the boring college classes.

This answer on Quora made me realise how awesome and vast the field of computer science is, and hopefully I will get my hands dirty in these subjects in the next two years.

Thanks Ryan Witt.

Read Ryan Witt's answer to What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack? on Quora

This week of mine : HackerRank CodeAgon 2015

So, two days back, I participated in this contest and in my own words, I have to accept that I performed miserably. I could solve only the first question out of the five given, and two of the rest were actually based on segment trees, a data structure that I hadn't heard of till then.

So, of course this week I am going to learn this and spend my time reading and figuring out how to solve the rest of those questions.

I wish that was it. But there is another part of story. There happened to be a test yesterday of Computer Architecture, and out of the given two questions, I solved one which even a 10th grade student can solve, and the second one, which made the game level-play ,but I couldn't even understand the question.

What all this means is I need to give focus on my semester subjects also, because I am not able to understand much in the class in any of the subjects, be it this one, or Microprocessors, or Finance.

Which simply means I need to restructure my time management, otherwise I may not be able to enjoy these subjects, which in my opinion are pretty cool.