Jan 24 - Daily Programming Diary

14:00

I'm feeling bored and I think I should work on something. Yesterday we discussed about implementing a feature so that people could post testimonials about the event that they attended. While the meeting is schedules to take place at night, I think I should get started with it.

Hurdle 1 - The Admin Pages are broken. There is an error which is making the components which rely on the <ProtectedRouteAdmin /> not being able to render properly.
After banging my head on the wall for 30 minutes, I figured out the error, the props! The component was being passed as render prop and not as a component which complicated stuff for the route handler.

Hurdle 2 - The react-slick is working in a very weird manner. There seems to be a property bug and since I didn't implement the feature, I'm not even able to figure out the code. But I guess that's the most important part of being a developer. Understanding code written by other people, optimizing it, and making great stuff with it. I have been in support of creating a documentation since day 1 and now I feel that it is strongly required.

16:00

I finally got to implementing the testimonials feature. Pretty straightforward if you ask me. Create a map, store the UID with their testimonial and we are done.

17:00

Done with that. Wow, that was fast!

Time for the Leetcode challenge. I have never worked on a problem like this since I always thought that it requires a lot of knowledge but here I am, trying to figure out a way to solve this question.

The first approach I can think of is to combine two lists and then two, and so on. Okay, that seems to simplify the problem a bit. Writing the code for merging two lists doesn't seem to be that big a problem.

Now what?
Well, now I have to figure out a way to merge lists one by one. Let's say I have n lists.

That looks great. So merge the lists one by one using 2 pointers, then when 2^nd pointer gets lesser than 1^st, change 1^st to 0.

And that works! Nice! Woah!

Copymerge-k-sorted-lists.cpp: copy code to clipboard
1ListNode *mergeTwoLists(ListNode *l1, ListNode *l2) {
2    if (!l1) return l2;
3    if (!l2) return l1;
4
5    ListNode *head = new ListNode();
6    ListNode *ans = head;
7
8    while (l1 != NULL && l2 != NULL) {
9        if (l1->val < l2->val) {
10            head->next = l1;
11            l1 = l1->next;
12            head = head->next;
13        } else {
14            head->next = l2;
15            l2 = l2->next;
16            head = head->next;
17        }
18    }
19
20    if (l1 == NULL) {
21        head->next = l2;
22    } else {
23        head->next = l1;
24    }
25
26    return ans->next;
27}
28
29ListNode *mergeKLists(vector<ListNode *> &lists)
30{
31    int i = 0, j = lists.size() - 1;
32
33    if (lists.size() == 0) return NULL;
34
35    while (i < j) {
36        lists[i] = mergeTwoLists(lists[i], lists[j]);
37        i++;
38        j--;
39        if (i >= j) {
40            if (j == 0)
41                return lists[0];
42            i = 0;
43        }
44    }
45    return lists[0];
46}

19:00

The meeting got cancelled, so I guess I don't have much work to do.

Going out, not working anymore!

EOD Checklist

• Leetcode January Challenge
• Raahee
• This blog