Weekly Coding • 2024-11-11

Hello everyone. Last week I worked on the following:

1. Digital painting: 12 hours
   1. Coloring a drawing. I used a black-and-white sketch that wasn't my own, and decided to only add color... This involved laying down colors, shadows, etc., and took much longer than initially anticipated. I'm doing this without AI; still not finished 🥵
2. Solving problems on LeetCode: 3 hours
   1. 49. Group Anagrams
      1. This was easy; used a HashMap 😴 The solution to the problem fits in 10 lines of TypeScript code.
   2. 51. N-Queens
      1. Chess... I was able to write a solution, but couldn't optimize it. So, I used pre-calculation: on my home computer, I calculated all nine possible solutions, and then sent the code with the pre-prepared solutions for the online test.
   3. 52. N-Queens II
      1. This problem is the same as the previous one. I would even consider it a subproblem. The previous problem required generating chess solutions, while this problem needs to output the number of solutions - does the same thing, but returns .length;

...and I keep encountering problems that I remember from computer science class: I recall those chess problems 😐 and I remember how desperately I tried to solve them on Turbo Pascal during a 45-minute lesson. Over the past weekend, it took me 2 hours to solve this problem. And yes, "pre-calculation" in school wouldn't have worked: computers back then were tens of times slower than my home computer today, so I'd have had to wait even longer for the pre-calculation of the chess problem to finish. In 45 minutes, there's no way I could've done it 🌧️