Sunday, November 1, 2020

Leetcode article: Requesting guidance from those who solved 1000+ Leets so far!

 

I spent over 20 minutes to write some ideas to answer the question. 

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I have solved over 1170+ Leetcode problems (including database and shell scripting problems). However, when I try to particular in a weekly coding contest, I can hardly finish all 4 problems (usually only 2 or 3 problems finished) within the 1.5 hrs time window. It seems to me that solving a lot of Leetcode problems in a relatively relaxed setting does not help me very much in competitive programming (under time constrain). And suggestion / advice on how to become more efficient and more competitive in programming contests? Any such suggestion & advice will be much appreciated!

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I have same concern. I only solved 520 algorithms.
I am trying a few ideas recently. Three things I can think about.

  1. Read Leetcode discuss post from lee215 more often.
  2. Read more blogs from GrandYang on Leetcode.com.
  3. Continue to practice same question, like word break, lowest common ancestor
  4. Go over same type of questions together.
  5. Keep practice. Solve Leetcode using Python language or JavaScript again.

More on item 1, today I copied his code and translated to C#, it took me 10 minutes, but I wrote 40 minutes in weekly contest using my own idea. Lee315 is a great thinker, crafting skill is top level.

More on item 3, I practiced Lowest common ancestor three months, ask the same algorithm three months as an interviewer, but I still fail tree algorithm on weekly contest. I think that problem solving skills cannot be improved on one area like tree algorithm first. We have to work on all of them together.

More on item 4, I reviewed 50 dynamic programming algorithm last week using the link: Leetcode userful links - https://leetcode.com/discuss/general-discussion/665604/important-and-useful-links-from-all-over-the-leetcode/742440

More on item 5. I practice interviews on interviewing dot io last two years over 300+ times. I got a lot of advice how to improve, and I was able to advance my ranking to top 40%, and got invited to interview with startup on interviewing dot io because of my performance as an interviewee last month. But I still could not improve my weekly contest performance. Most of important is to write a lot of code every day, try to write same code shared on Leetcode discuss post, compare difference, and learn more crafting ideas, get smart on debugging and trouble shooting, get used to read code and find bugs quickly. No need to use debugger.

Take some time off to read some books. I like to recommend a book called "The art of readable code". I wish that I read similar book 20 years ago.

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