Perpetually Confused

Have you ever heard of a symbol table? It’s a data type with some nice properties, and it was the subject of  Week 3 of Computer Science: Algorithms, Theory and Machines from Princeton University. Before we talk about what a symbol table is, let’s talk about what I am going to be implementing today. I want … More Frequency Analysis: An implementation using symbol tables

I’m back with another write up about a programming problem I solved this week for the class Computer Science: Algorithms, Theory and Machines from Princeton University. This weeks lessons were about queue and stack data structures, and like last week, it was largely review. One distinction that was made this week that I had not … More Algorithms: Reverse Polish Notation

In my quest to learn more about computers, I’ve decided to go back to the basics and take another introductory computer science class. This one is called Computer Science: Algorithms, Theory and Machines from Princeton University and is hosted on the Coursera platform. The class is a follow up to a CS101 class, and it … More Go at the Command Line

Hey there! I’m getting back into interviewing shape so I wanted to share with you some of the problems I’ve been working on. Here is the problem statement: How would you design a stack which, in addition to push and pop, has a function min which returns the minimum element? All functions should operate in … More Data Structures: Keeping track of a minimum with a stack

Hello there! It’s time for another algorithm discussion. This one is fun and demonstrates why data structures are important. Here is the problem statement: You are given two non-empty linked lists representing two non-negative integers. The digits are stored in reverse order and each of their nodes contain a single digit. Add the two numbers and return it as … More Algorithms: Add two numbers represented by linked lists

Problem statement: Given a 32-bit signed integer, reverse digits of an integer. Ex: 123 = 321,  -123 = -321, 120 = 21, 1234567899 = 0 because 2^31 overflow! I really like this problem. The solution is clever but not too clever, and I think it points to different strategies for solving a problem. Okay, so let’s start … More Algorithms: Reversing an Integer

I recently deployed my first major product into the field and I want to share some lessons that I learned with you. The product is a single page application (SPA) dashboard that our customers (most of them in West Africa) use to monitor how our product (B2B) is being used in their applications. The SPA … More Improving web application performance in the field