YoungForest's blog

Hexo is a powerful blog engine. It is a good choice for a personal blog. I have used it for 5 years. Recently, I setup my English site besides the original Chinese site. With 2 sites, it is more work to write, git and deploy.
Fortunately, there is a better solution for this problem. We could use Travis CI to automatically deploy the blog. The remain work is writing posts and git commit and push them. The CI would help us to deploy sites automatically.

For this year’s fall contest, I only participated in the team contest, not the individual contest. In the spring contest, I teamed up with Uncle Lai and Brother Xianmu, and the result was not very ideal. In the fall contest, I teamed up with Baobao as a two-person team, and the result was actually quite good. In particular, Baobao not only did not slow me down, but also made an important contribution to the team. Without her smoothly solving Q3, our team’s rank would definitely not look as good as it does now.

After solving four problems in one hour, only five people AC’d the last two problems. After staring at them for a long time, we did not find any idea with a feasible time complexity. So we decisively gave up, and the last two hours were saved for doing something else.

LeetCode biweekly contest 61

LeetCode weekly contest 259

This weekend is Chinese mid-autumn festival, which is a tradition day to got together with family. I am a country boy. My family live in another province, Shanxi. It is about 1,000 km far from Beijing, where I studied and work. Because of that, I cannot visit my parents. Fortunately, my girlfriend grow in Beijing. Her parents invite us to their home for lunch and dinner. They prepared much seafood because their daughter loves it. This is my excuse for not attending this contest.
I solved those problems after contest and share my intuitions and solutions now.

So no score board here.

From this week, I will write my summary posts for the LeetCode weekly and biweekly contests in English. Before this, I have written more than 100 LeetCode contests summary posts in Chinese. For future international interviews and jobs opportunities, I believe writing English LeetCode summary is a good way to improve my expression and algorithm.

Since joining Amazon, I have had more exposure to English and foreign colleagues. The need to practice using English has grown stronger. Also, to connect more with the international world, I decided to create my own English blog.

Steps

Use the Chinese blog as a template and create an English blog.

1

cp -r Hexo HexoEn

It has been a long time since I did not need to check in. I had checked in for three weeks before, and I really could not take it anymore. After starting work, I have spent much less energy and time on problem solving. Many check-ins were done by my girlfriend, or I simply copied one. You get what you put in. Learning is like rowing upstream: if you do not advance, you fall back. My weekly contest results have indeed declined because my ability has declined. Although I do not plan to change this and am slowly accepting the fact, I will still keep doing weekly contests and stay in the Cruel Problem Solving group, just to maintain a basic problem-solving feel. There is no need to set excessively high expectations for myself.

Recently, besides work, I have spent a lot of time on investing and personal finance.

This week’s Q4 was extremely hard. After thinking for half an hour, I decisively gave up and went to make Coca-Cola chicken wings with my girlfriend.

Interestingly, after the contest, LC China went down. Scores could not be fetched, and the Cruel Coding board defaulted everyone to 0 points. I felt bad for the students on the China site.

Without noticing, I had skipped the weekly contest blog for another three weeks. Although I kept participating in weekly contests, after contests I often forgot to summarize and review them. On ordinary days, I also relaxed my problem-solving practice. For daily check-ins, either I let my girlfriend solve them or copied previous submissions. After all, I have already solved 1300+ problems myself, and the problems that appear are often ones I have done before.

The main reason is still that life has become much richer after starting work, and the priority of problem solving and weekly contests has dropped a lot. I skipped multiple biweekly contests too. The temptation of having fun is too strong.