LeetCode Monthly Challenge - May'20 Edition - Early review

LeetCode Monthly Challenge - May’20 Edition? Is your feed full of the LeetCode April/May challenge posts? Do you want to try it? Is it for you?

Let’s find out!

Originally published here on LinkedIn

TL;DR: Verdict - Good for getting into habit and practice for beginners but for the more initiated I’d recommend ditching this! Having only coded on Hackerrank, I can only suggest that to you right now. (link at the end)

On 30th April 2020, LinkedIn was quite something. The feed was full of posts from fellow developers who had just completed the April challenge, which was made viral by Akshay Saini. I used to code on Hackerrank back in college, but after 2+ years when the opportunity came I thought, why not give this a try?

LeetCode is a popular competitive coding platform which has initiated these monthly code everyday challenges. Its popularity rose with the conclusion of April ‘20 Edition. And now the May edition has begun - wherein you’ll be served a new coding problem every day and you have to solve it within the stipulated time-frame. The UI/UX is quite pleasant and easy for beginners. You can find the challenge page here.

Now for the review, it seems like, in the race between quality vs quantity, latter has won again! Having solved 2 challenges so far I can say that test cases are not vigorous and for some reason, the run-time calculation seems off.

Lack of good quality test cases means - the calibre of the algorithm can not be judged.

For example - today’s problem (2nd May ‘20 - Day 2 - Jewels & Stones) had an upper limit on input string size at 50. Now at this size, it really does not matter who is using an AVL, Frequency Array or simply a brute force approach. Their run-time distribution showed the best approaches being the brute force ones!

But I am anyway going to continue with this because of the genius of what Akshay has proposed - the entire cycle - coding + publishing on GitHub + sharing with the world; is something I have never done. Maybe will also maintain a repository for all of my Hackerrank submissions.

Here is my progress so far with some additional info and comments. Will be updating Git Repository daily. Please let know if I can help you in any way! Let’s learn & code together.

GitHub repository: here!

You can check out this Interview Prep series curated by Hackerrank or their Problem Solving series in its entirety.

यद्यदाचरति श्रेष्ठस्तत्तदेवेतरो जनः ।
स यत्प्रमाणं कुरुते लोकस्तदनुवर्तते ॥
                                                 – Bhagavad Gita 3.21॥

(Read about this Shloka from the Bhagavad Gita here at http://sanskritslokas.com/)