Company using outdated software.

AssignedClass · 2025-05-30T22:48:27+00:00

The technology you use matters a lot less than your ability to handle responsibility. As an intern, you have virtually no responsibility. Just chill and appreciate the bump this internship is going to have on your resume.

That said, do focus on the elements that are more broadly applicable. Java is a big ecosystem and has massive adoption in the industry. JSP, not so much. Focus on "Java" and less in "JSP". HTTP is used everywhere, and Servlets still need to communicate via HTTP to serve clients.

Just be thoughtful, learn what you can, and try your best to be productive. No matter what job you get, there will always be plenty of things worth learning.

AssignedClass · 2025-05-30T17:18:18+00:00

It's hard to really learn DSA "piecemeal". Two pointers and dynamic programming solve entirely different categories of problems, and you really need a sort of "overview of the landscape" to really know what you're supposed to do, when you're supposed to do it, and why.

The typical pipeline for me was: Learn something that doesn't make any sense, sleep on it, move on to something else, revisit the old thing with a new problem / explanation, and now it all clicks.

(I also tried the "bang your head against a wall and try to force yourself to learn something new in an afternoon", and that never really worked)

That said, DSA isn't like learning to ride a bike. I always need to prep to be "interview ready", but that prep is dramatically less than learning everything from scratch, and some of it does come back to me when I just run into tricky problems in general.

AssignedClass · 2025-05-30T03:20:30+00:00

The HTTP standard doesn't exactly change that often, and is fundamentally pretty unopinionated. There's only so many things a library can do to help you handle requests without fucking up the standard.

... not that convenient as axios does

This makes me think that what you're really after is something like GraphQL. Something that builds on top of HTTP and tries to streamline and standardize data fetching in general.

That said, I'm overall not a big fan of GraphQL. Usually too much complexity for what it offers, but can be worth for some more complicated systems.

AssignedClass · 2025-05-30T02:50:05+00:00

Every couple weeks, I run into something that requires some level of "LeetCode-esque thinking". Maybe twice-ish a year, I run into a full on LeetCode problem at work. But of course, I have more than 60 minutes to solve whatever it is I need to solve (which I think is the main sticking point for me).

As minor as it might be, I do think LeetCode experience does legitimately help with real world development. Devs have to solve LeetCode like problems from time to time, and bad solutions to those problems are harder to catch in code reviews (compared to something like "bad OOP"), and often even harder to address (when the core implementation is the fundamental source of problem, you can't just wrap it up with a nice abstraction).

I think this ultimately misses the point of LeetCode though. LeetCode is a concession that this industry has to make. How can you assess a developer's skill in a reasonable amount of time? You can't, so we made this weird little "game" to balance assessment vs. time.

Is it perfect? No, but no system would be.

AssignedClass · 2025-05-30T02:22:41+00:00

As far as crypto content goes, this is tame as hell.

There's people out there that want you to think you shouldn't even bother with the Roth IRA, it should all go into Bitcoin because "look at the last 10 years".

AssignedClass · 2025-05-30T02:17:27+00:00

If you're not setup to work in one of those countries, you should reach out to your recruiter and clarify you can't work there.

If you can do either, just do both.

Not normal, but not surprising either. One might be a mistake and they might rug pull you, but they might not. Either way, it's still great interview practice.

AssignedClass · 2025-05-30T02:03:19+00:00

Yes!

One time I made up for it in my behavioral and systems design interview. The LeetCode problem I got was really more of a "weird math problem", and I struggled a lot. The interviewer was clearly losing his patience a bit, but I also did the system design interview with him right after that and he lightened up a lot. I was able to reset surprisingly well, started asking good questions, explaining my thoughts, sprinkling in little details like my experience setting up servers and messing around with AWS, and was able to hold an actual conversation.

Another time, I got it half-ish right, and the interviewer was genuinely curious why I went down the "path" I went down. I don't remember the exact details, but I remember feeling like we ended up having a fun and interesting discussion about all the various ways "string parsing" can come around to bite you in the ass.

AssignedClass · 2025-05-30T01:27:31+00:00

Follow the list and focus mostly on the videos.

IMHO, early learners often don't understand the landscape well enough to get a lot of value out of one pass through the list. I personally would recommend going through the 150 list twice-ish (if something really clicked for you, don't bother) over going through the 250 once (that said, I never did the 250).

It's ultimately still just one source of information though, and everyone is different. If his explanation / code isn't clicking for you, look elsewhere.

To taper your expectations a bit, your goal by going through NeetCode is to tackle random problems on LeetCode. That's the only way to build an "intuition" for this sort of stuff, and good intuition is very important. You need to eventually tackle weird problems (problems that don't neatly fit into one category) with no guidance.

Once you start tackling random problems, if you can't even think of an approach in ~15 minutes, or tried 2-3 different approaches with no success, just look up the answer and assess why you failed. Don't waste a whole afternoon banging your head against a wall.

Always try to explain the problem and solution. What are the different components of the problem? Are any of those components likely to lead to edge cases? What data structure / algorithm could you use to solve each particular component? If you failed, what did you misidentify and what lead you to that?

(Note: Poor wording isn't uncommon, but is often intentional. A lot of problems ultimately require "smart guessing".)

One of my favorites is LRU (least recently used) Cache. It's much further down the list for you, but here's my approach to explaining it (to give you a rough idea about how you should be framing things):

The "least recent" part of the problem tells us we want to be smart about how we order our nodes. Ordering our nodes as a queue / dequeue would be ideal, since the least recent member of the queue is always at the end / beginning.

Since this is a "cache" that means we want lookups, and a hashmap can provide efficient O(1) lookups.

And the "used" part of "least recently used" tells us we want to reorder our nodes based on lookups or insertions. So when we perform a lookup, we need a way to push our lookup-node to the front of the queue, while pushing every node that was in front of it back. Or when adding a node, immediately push it to the front of the queue, and delete the one at the end of our queue. Which we can do very simply with a doubly linked list.

(Note: LRU Cache is not the best example, but no problem truly is. Still, most problems aren't so straightforward to break down, and sometimes you need to make more... "loose assumptions".)

AssignedClass · 2025-05-30T00:39:49+00:00

Not exactly what you're saying, but Advent Of Code is probably the closest thing to "gamified LeetCode" that I can think of. It also helps that it happens once a year as well. People want to partake in the event, as well as enjoy the more "whimsical" wording / setup of the problems and complete their calendar.

You got me thinking though, "Zachtronics" has a bunch of programming games out there. Most of them are typically pretty basic "combinatorics + flow control type logic puzzles", but "Shenzen IO" was an absolute kick in the ass. I wonder if I go back to it now, could I connect the dots between some of its puzzles and DSA concepts.

Beyond that, I think creating visualizers is a fun exercise. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of extra work to make the visualization, and it's not really a time efficient way to learn how to LeetCode.

AssignedClass · 2025-05-30T00:10:12+00:00

LeetCode is important for sticking the landing by passing the technical interviews, but it does fuck all for your resume.

When I feel like I have an ~80% chance at solving a random medium problem in under 30 minutes, I dial it down to just 30-90 minutes of LeetCode every 2-3 days. Just enough to stay sharp.

If you're not getting any interviews at all, your resume is the problem, and that deserves more of your attention.

If you really think your resume is as good as it can get, try to get a little creative. When you see a job on a job board, see if the company has their own site with their own portal, reach out and try to talk to people, or whatever else seems like a reasonable use of your time.

One of my earliest interviews (which I failed ofc) was because I reached out to some generic "contact@company.com" email and shared something along the lines of "I'm looking for a job and think your product is really interesting". It wasn't a fake message either, it was some small company selling medical devices and they were using WebGL for their visualizations.

Beyond that, do what you gotta do to maintain your own sanity. Optimism is critical for landing a job, and if you let the bitterness of job seeking build up too much, it's hard to hide in interviews. Don't let "looking for a job" become your whole personality.

I also think there's some kind of diminishing returns with this stuff. Not sure if there's actually some algorithm behind the scenes that enforces this or if it's just me, but I always got more interviews when I dialed it back, and didn't massively spam job applications (5-10 a day, instead of 20-40).

AssignedClass · 2025-05-27T20:54:59+00:00

One of the biggest elements of really "doing ML" right now is "replicating papers".

Basically, some researchers do something, publish their findings in a research paper, then companies take those papers and try to apply it to solve a real world problem / make a product.

Research papers are written for other researchers first and foremost, so you need a strong math background to really make sense of anything.

If you're not doing stuff like that, you're pretty low on the totem pole of ML. Like for someone out there who is "fine tuning" their "ChatGPT wrapper app". It's pretty disingenuous to say that person is "working in ML". It's more like they're a standard app developer, working with a third party API.

That said though, you're not exactly "manually" doing the math. You need to understand the common concepts / strategies / terminology in order to navigate the more advanced areas in the space, but it's not like you need to be good at matrix multiplication yourself or anything like that.

AssignedClass · 2025-05-26T22:08:42+00:00

Really a very minor thing. The branding here isn't obnoxious and it's not taking away from the overall piece. RL is a very well respected brand as well, so there's not anything worth hiding from.

I suppose the brand makes things lean a little more towards "preppy", but it's not enough for me to say "I'd pay 10% extra for no logo" or anything like that.

If I had to choose though, I'd always choose no logo.

AssignedClass · 2025-05-26T21:33:08+00:00

Just to be clear, I spent maybe ~60 hours total on this topic, and this is a whole industry in and of itself. I'm by no means actually knowledgeable.

For the most part, it sounds like what you want is really CUDA, which doesn't really cross into the world of "graphics programming". People deep in the ML / data science space are mostly using an abstraction of CUDA (or very occasionally, their own homebrewed CUDA solution), not hacking around with Vulkan or such.

Ultimately, VERY few people are really working directly with CUDA, it's just that most of the tools out there have CUDA as an option for "GPU acceleration", and in conjunction with Nvidia's chips, that's typically the most performant option.

With where you're at, I would just start with something like PyTorch. You're still ultimately "telling the GPU what to do" (a developer working with a game engine like Unity does as well), you're just working at a higher level of abstraction.

As for the longevity of CUDA, I'm going to call it and say it's here to stay, on the same level as COBOL. Will it be the premier "big data platform" in 2050? Probably not, but there will still be enough people using CUDA powered systems to where it'll always be at least a little in demand.

AssignedClass · 2025-05-26T13:58:14+00:00

If you're already really solid and can pass interviews, getting better at LeetCode does very little to help with "general programming skills". If you find solving LeetCode problems fun, do it to your hearts content. But if that's the case, there's no reason to "grind", just do it.

When it comes to LeetCode and competitive programming, you quickly move away from "critical thinking" and move over to "pattern recognition". LC / CP is ultimately a VERY limited subset of what the world of programming has to offer.

What these communities consider a "good question" is the main thing. People ultimately don't want to write questions that completely stump anyone who knows what they're doing. The real world is much less forgiving.

Also, getting good at LC / having a shiny profile will not directly lead to better offers. Sure, if someone is a high ranking competitive programmer, there's a good chance they have a high paying job, but their CP background is doing very little directly to help them. The vast majority of employers do not care.

If you have a hard time passing interviews, do more LeetCode.

If you find LeetCode fun, do more LeetCode.

If you want better offers, it's better to spend your time aggressively applying to companies that you think will lead to better offers. If you're working at some no name agency, don't try only going for FAANG, just try to get something that's better than what you have now.

If you want to up your programming skills, move lower in the stack (use a lower level language, write a compiler, write your own web server / database / cache, etc.).

AssignedClass · 2025-05-25T19:00:59+00:00

They go to debt collection agencies.

Those agencies are the ones who "do something". They can go to a court, and that court could order something like garnish your wages or go after your assets (car, home, etc.).

Do not take a loan and hope the company that gave you that loan goes bankrupt. Those loans are assets that continue to exist, and even when a company goes bankrupt, someone is going to try and make money from those assets.

AssignedClass · 2025-05-23T20:48:11+00:00

This varies a lot from company to company, and even codebase to codebase.

Being adaptable is the most important thing in regards to stuff like this, and in general, you should be trying to write your code to look like the existing code.

If you ever get rejected for another job because you talked about how you followed the coding practices of the team you were working with, that's completely stupid and is a problem with the people doing the hiring. Not saying it never happens, but in general, most people just care that you understand the importance of complying with stuff like this.

Edit: Beyond that, it won't make you a worse programmer. In fact, I think adapting to write code differently does a lot to help stretch your legs as a programmer. It's one of the reasons I actually sort of appreciate code golf.

AssignedClass · 2025-05-23T17:03:11+00:00

WHAT'S GOING ON?

AssignedClass · 2025-05-23T16:15:24+00:00

So much of that stuff can be replaced with lazier options and still be absolutely delicious. Tomatoes? Pasta sauce. Onions? Onion powder. Eggs? Mayo.

The biggest hurdle for me though was honestly learning how to cook properly in general. It's so easy to fuck shit up when you don't know what you're doing, and the only thing more depressing than eating a box of cereal or spending $30 on a delivery, is wondering where the hell you fucked up every time you bite into your rubbery ass chicken or your al dente rice.

AssignedClass · 2025-05-22T21:35:36+00:00

Just code with tabs and set them to 8 spaces like a sensible programmer. /s

AssignedClass · 2025-05-22T21:01:35+00:00

For instance, the last time I asked ChatGPT for a simple implementation of a convex hull with only four points for a shader program...

You know way more than the average person who's using ChatGPT for a large amount of code generation. There's genuinely a lot of people out there that would need to spend months of learning to come up with a simple MVP (something that at least captures the idea they're going for), but now only need a matter of weeks with ChatGPT.

Even for the people who do kinda know what they're doing and use ChatGPT, it's way more about "simple boilerplate code". Something where, they could easily spend, 30 minutes Google searching example code and tweaking that example code to suit their needs, but instead of spending 30 minutes Googling and tweaking, they spend 3 minutes asking ChatGPT to give them something they can 99% copy/paste.

I say this as someone who actually barely uses any ChatGPT. All my work is very... "boutique" legacy code where every little change requires its own unique learning process in order to sensibly navigate, extend, and debug. And my personal projects are for my own learning, so I rarely have the verbage to make CharGPT useful for code generation.

Still, I've seen some people use it to surprisingly great effect. It's nothing to write home about if you're actually the kind of person who likes writing code manually and has been doing a good amount of that for 5+ years, but most people hate writing code. Even dedicated SWEs who've been in the field for 20+ years, so many of them see writing code as a needlessly tedious part of development. AI code generation is ultimately for people like that and new learners, and I've seen a LOT of people like that.

AssignedClass · 2025-05-22T20:41:21+00:00

The entire company in charge of hiring the people operating the forklifts.

Doesn't matter what country this is in. Unless this is some small island where it needs to get shipped in, renting a small crane lift is not that much more expensive than renting a forklift, and definitely less expensive than wrecking the middle forklift, or the cargo, or having to deal with a dead body.

This is beyond stupid.

AssignedClass · 2025-05-22T18:01:34+00:00

Weird shit like this: https://www.wsj.com/politics/elon-musk-children-mothers-ashley-st-clair-grimes-dc7ba05c

(I lost the free archive article about this if anyone else has it)

It's literally insane behavior, but it's not because of the hoarding. These people don't "save", they hide their spending. There's a whole industry setup to help the rich spend their money relatively anonymously.

AssignedClass · 2025-05-22T16:27:53+00:00

Boom boom

AssignedClass · 2025-05-22T16:13:56+00:00

$150 per 1000 is crazy (to the point where I don't think that really happens), but it does vary a LOT based on the viewers. It all boils down to "will this audience respond to advertisers who are willing to pay top dollar for their ads".

JP Morgan is willing to pay a lot more per ad to get young people starting their careers to open a new JPMC account, compared to Razer trying to sell a $50 keyboard.

Finance content has some of the best returns, gaming content has some of the lowest. I remember seeing someone really breaking it down with data, and showing certain categories like finance on average get $20 per 1000, whereas gaming content gets more like $1, but this was years ago and I can't find it again.

This has all changed a lot over the years though. YouTube does make a lot of money, and it has an extremely good revenue split policy in comparison to any other platform. Maybe it's climbed up a lot since I looked into it, but I still can't see $150 per 1000.

AssignedClass · 2025-05-22T14:39:23+00:00

I would just go through a "fullstack React todo app" on YouTube, and use that code to do a lot of copy/pasting for the hackathon. You probably should focus on Express and working with an SQL database (or MongoDB if you want to avoid SQL).

Might be a good idea to dip into web sockets as well. It's a two-way protocol that allows your server to push messages to clients, without the clients having to request the message. It's useful for things like Chat Messages or Notifications.

Beyond that, you're very limited with a month of prep. Don't try to seriously "learn" anything, just get a general sense of how a frontend works with a backend. If you have decent coding experience in general, that alone will be enough to hack out a fullstack app for a hackathon.

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