A lot of developers generally tend to brush up or learn data structures and algorithms when it’s time to look for a new job or an internship. During this time, resources like Cracking the Coding Interview, LeetCode, Codeforces, TopCoder, to name a few, become everyone’s favorite.

As has been the old adage, Practice makes Perfect.

Will practice alone make you a better programmer?

Is it enough to just solve 200+ problems on these online platforms or solve all the problems mentioned in Cracking the Coding Interview twice or thrice?

Will that really get you a job?

A…

There are no coincidences in this world.

— Grand Master Oogway

Well, Master Oogway, no disrespect, coincidences do occur and I think they are just God’s way of remaining anonymous. Not just me, Albert Einstein believes this too 😛.

111, that’s not really my lucky number, so to say.

However, this number filled me with joy and ecstasy when I saw it as my rank on the rankings page of the LeetCode contest number 111.

What a coincidence!

Programming Interviews are hard!

Telephone screening interviews are a bit easier than the traditional onsite whiteboard interviews. The whiteboard interviews involve a whole lot of pressure and anxiety due to the lack of a code editor to code on. The thing that these interviews do have in common is the kind of skills they test.

Usually, a programming interview will involve one programming challenge. The candidate has to work on it for the duration of the interview. The time allotted is usually 30–35 minutes. The first 10 minutes are taken up by introductions and other things.

Given a programming problem…

Arrays are one of the most versatile data structures out there. Arrays form the basis of so many applications and numerous algorithms and data structures are based on them.

For e.g. the binary search algorithm works the way it does because the array data structure provides us with random access of the contents. If we take away the random access, we can’t execute the famous binary search algorithm with the same time complexities as before.

Similarly, we have the priority queue data structure which is again based on the array representation of a complete binary tree and the…

Build it, train it, test it, Makes it denser, deeper, faster, smarter! — Siraj Raval

What’s all the hype about Deep Learning and what is a Neural Network anyway?

Essentially,

• you have an architecture
• with millions of parameters shared amongst thousands of neurons
• stacked up in multiple layers
• with various activation functions applied to the logits or outputs of the layers
• and normalized inputs fed with random weight initializations.
• The loss on the training batch defines the gradients for the back-propagation step through the network
• and stochastic gradient descent doing its magic to train the model and minimize the loss…

Do you know the amount of global air traffic in 2017? Do you know what the rise has been for air traffic over the past several years ? Well, lets look at some statistics.

In order to understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.

Crazy, isn’t it ?

Well, I hope that by the end of this article you will feel much more confident about what recursion is and mainly, how we can come up with a recursive solution to a problem.

What is Recursion?

How do you explain recursion to a 4 year old? This is a pretty famous interview question, and there are loads of answers available on the web. We won’t answer this question as it is too mainstream.

If you are as clever as I am 🤓🤓, you would explain recursion to someone…

by Sachin Malhotra and Divya Godayal

Welcome back, Caretaker!

In case you’ve forgotten the problem we were trying to tackle in the previous article, let us revise it for you.

So there’s this naughty kid Peter and he’s going to pester his new caretaker, you!

As a caretaker, one of the most important tasks for you is to tuck Peter in bed and make sure he is sound asleep. Once you’ve tucked him in, you want to make sure that he’s actually asleep and not up to some mischief.

You cannot, however, enter the room again, as that would surely…