Lazar-Codes

Former health sciences student who realized she can code, and here we are! Also, I have an art blog that I now rarely post on, but I want to change that soon: www.tumblr.com/lazar-arts

[lazar-codes]

Hello World

Hi everyone! After being a lurker on here for a good amount of time, I'm finally forcing myself to come out of my shell and post here (and hopefully be active in the community)!

A bit about me; I'm just about to wrap up my bachelor degree in Health Sciences, and despite spending 7 years in post-secondary not strictly in computer science, I've grown fond of programming. After spending 4 years slowly learning it, and soon to be out of school, I'm making it my mission to get a job in programming.

So why am I creating this blog? Essentially, I'm using this to keep myself accountable for working on projects that I can add to my currently (very) small portfolio. Do I have any ideas for these projects? Nope, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

[lazar-codes]

I started writing this on the 5th and then got busy with life, so I'm gonna leave that text there and just combine today's log with it.

05/12/2025

Hey, so...I interviewed for 4 jobs in 3 days last week and I got an offer! I start on Monday! Admittedly, it's not explicitly a programming job, but I get to do programming on the side if I'm interested. I actually didn't really meet the job requirements but they liked that I had ReactJS on my CV, so that's pretty cool!

09/12/2025

Ok, I'm on day 2 of my job and it would be better if I hadn't gotten sick over the weekend. While I'm feeling a lot better now (as today was work from home), yesterday's in-person onboarding was tough to get through with a semi-functional brain. My main job is to calibrate cameras and make sure that they're online and functional, which is actually really exciting since I like working with physical things. I'm learning the ropes of how to do basic stuff and find basic info, but I really just want to be at the point that I know how to do stuff so that I can actually work and be independent. Obviously that'll take some time, but I'm excited to get to that point. Anyways, I'm happy to be employed!

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20/10/2025

I did about 3 or 4 easy HackerRank questions which weren't worth writing about here, since they were very easy and I completed them in less than 5 mins.

Frontend Mentor - News Homepage Log #2

I didn't write anything for the first log because it was just me working on the header. Today was more of the same, but I fixed a bug where the dropdown menu would re-appear if you switched from mobile to desktop, then mobile again. So...yay! Next up, the content...which will basically just be normal HTML.

[lazar-codes]

14/10/2025

HackerRank - Find the Smallest Missing Positive Integer (time: 26mins)

Listen, I got 12/15 test cases to pass, and I can't think of any other test cases I'm missing. 12/15 is 80%, so I'm calling it done. With this question, I sorted the list into ascending order and iterated through the list until I hit the first positive number, and stored that number's index. I checked to see if that number is 1, and if it isn't, then I return 1. Otherwise, I iterate through the list looking 1 position ahead to see if the next number is the current number + 1. If not, then I return what the current number + 1 would be, since that's the smallest missing positive integer.

LeetCode - Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock (time: 9mins)

Idk what to say about this one, as it wasn't that difficult. All I did was iterate over the list, and if the next value was greater than the current value, go forward to calculate the max possible profit. If it's bigger than the current max profit, replace the current with the new max profit. And that's it. I did, however, get to use a ternary operator, and I'm happy I got to to use it.

LeetCode - Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock II (time: 7mins)

I glanced at the discussions for this question and someone explained it well, where you only need to look at the adjacent value. So that's what I did; I iterated over my array of values and if the next value was greater than the current, I added their difference to my overall profit variable. At the end, I returned my profit variable. The other solutions offered by people actually explain the logic, and I mostly understand it, but I'm too lazy to re-iterate it.

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13/10/2025

LeetCode - Majority Element (time: 15mins)

I got to use my favourite data structure; my beautiful Map/HashMap. Luckily, I've gained the reflex of seeing problems involving counting the frequency of elements and immediately thinking of using the Map data structure. So, with that in mind, this question wasn't hard. I iterated over the input array and added the current element in the array as a key in the map and add a value of 1 to it. If that key already exists, then take the value of the key and add 1. Then, iterate over the the Map and find the key with the highest value, and voila, you've got the majority element (well, the key whose value is greater than the length of the array divided by 2, according to the problem description).

LeetCode - Rotate Array (time: 50mins)

Ok, so technically I completed this in 30 mins in the sense that I passed all but 1 testcase (thanks Time Limit Exceeded error), but then I continued to work on this problem afterwards and I actually solved it with my own thought process?! I cannot describe the joy I felt hitting submit and seeing the end screen saying that I passed all test cases.

I first calculated the remainder of the number of rotations divided by the length of the list, so that way I don't have to rotate the array more times than needed. Then, I created a subarray containing the numbers at the edge of the array that will wraparound and find themselves at the start of the array after the rotation. Then, I simply iterate over the main array starting at the back, and replace the current value with the value found k rotations behind it. After all the numbers have shifted, we've got to deal with the start of the array, which will be our wraparound numbers. So, I iterated over the temp array and filled out the original array with those numbers, and I got it! I'm happy.

[lazar-codes]

10/10/2025

I think I'm gonna go back to "easy" problems to boost my confidence, because despite doing this for 3 weeks now I feel like I've gotten worse at problem-solving.

HackerRank - Plus Minus (time: 9mins)

This one was too easy, but I still learned a new Java feature. If I want to get a number to a certain decimal point, I can use the DecimalFormat class to specify what my output will look like. So, after wrapping my ratio of positives, negatives, and zeros from an array into the DecimatFormat method numberFormat.format(number), I got to have my output be to 6 decimal points. Neat.

HackerRank - Mini-Max Sum (time: 4mins)

Anytime I have a problem involving an array of numbers, I first check to see if the order of numbers is important according to the question. If not, I immediately sort the array. In the case of this question, it helped to work with a sorted array because once I had the sum of all the numbers in the array, I can just subtract the first and last element of the sum to get the max and min totals, respectively.

HackerRank - Time Conversion (time: 5mins)

I did this question a few weeks ago, but the study set that I'm looking at and doing had this question, so I thought I'd give it a go again. This time, it took me less time and I used less lines of code, mostly because of the handing substring method Java has. The main part of this question is to determine whether the current time is in "AM" or "PM", and make changes accordingly. For "AM", if the hour is 12, then change it to "00". If it's "PM" and the time is 12, then don't do anything. Otherwise, add 12 to the hour. Then, combine it all together to get the time in military time (without the "AM/PM").

[lazar-codes]

09/10/2025

Ok, I did do some programming theory studying yesterday, but aside from that and the one HackerRank question I did, I took the day off and basically just did art for the remainder of the late afternoon/evening. Which means that I need to get back into programming today, but I'm so tired.

HackerRank - Merge and Sort Intervals (time: 1h18mins)

Disclaimer: I didn't actually finish this one. I have 3 test cases that I just can't pass, and it sucks because idk what the input is so I'm not getting any feedback whatsoever. I think my logic for this one is good (once I actually read the instructions and followed it step by step). I start by checking to see if the input list is empty or of size 1. If it's empty, I return an empty list. If it's size 1, then I return the list. Otherwise, I initialize a new list and add the first elements from the original list. Then, I iterate over the original list and compare the min element in the original list's current position with the max element of my new list at the last position. If the original min is smaller than the new max, it means there's overlap. So, I check to see if the max in the original sublist is greater than the max in my new list, and if so, I replace my new list max with the original max. Otherwise, I do nothing and continue iterating through the original list. At the end, I should have my new list be composed of intervals that don't overlap. Again, I failed 3 test cases, so other I'm not cleaning the data properly or I'm missing something.

[lazar-codes]

08/10/2025

I woke up to an email from a company asking me to do their assessment, and it took me 1.5 hours. It wasn't even a coding assessment, more like a personality/logic/comprehension thing. I'm really glad they didn't have a timer for this one though, since the info/intro text said it should take about an hour to complete. I'm also still waiting to hear back from another company whose assessment I did last week...

That being said, I'm feeling really drained today.

HackerRank - Count Elements Greater than Previous Average (time: 16mins)

The most frustrating thing about this question was having some test cases fail because I was using int instead of double for the calculations (which I think is really stupid, but fine). The only reason why I figured that out was because I was scrolling through the discussions board to see if people failed the same cases, and one person pointed out that int may not be the best variable to use if you're using Java.

But the logic of this was easy; starting at index 1 of the list, add the previous elements leading up to this index and get the average for it, then compare to see if the current element is greater than the average. If so, then I increase my variable keeping track of the times this has occurred.

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07/10/2025

My eyeballs were burning yesterday after filling out so many job applications. I've decided to focus primarily on graduate programmes, even if it means I'd start work next year. But it's very tedious to write what my skills are and such...like I said, my eyeballs were burning yesterday because of all of that.

LeetCode - Reshape the Matrix (time: 31mins)

I said I'd do some matrix practice, so here we are! Back to LeetCode for a bit. I don't think I did this one the way it's supposed to be done, but I still got a solution for it. First off, I needed to check if the length of the original and new matrix matched, because if they didn't then I wouldn't be able to reshape the original matrix into the new one. If they matched, then I iterated over my new empty matrix and filled it with values from the original matrix by keeping track of the current position of the original matrix. If at any point the current column number of the original matrix exceeded, then reset the original matrix's column number to 0 and increase the original matrix row counter by 1.

LeetCode - Remove Element (time: 35mins)

This took longer than it should have because I was stubborn and wanted to make my way work...oops. But the way I ended up solving it wasn't efficient at all with regards to edge cases. I am, however, happy with how I solved the main thing. I first sorted the array into ascending order, and found the index of the first occurring instance of the value we want to remove. Then, I initialized two pointers; the left pointer was at this index and the right pointer was at the end of the list. With this, I swapped the elements at the pointers to put our undesired values at the back of the list. Once all the swapping is done, I then count the number of items in the array until we hit our bad number, and return this count.

[lazar-codes]

06/10/2025

The weekend is over, so it's time to get back to the grind of doing programming problems and applying for jobs.

HackerRank - Counter Game (time: 19mins)

This was a good start to my day! The struggle I had with this question was simply googling what Math function to use to solve this problem, so it wasn't really a struggle. This was just a simple while loop to continue to modify the input until it met its condition. That, plus keeping track of whose turn it was (which was easily done with a simply boolean flag).

HackerRank - Sum vs XOR (time: 16mins)

This one kinda feels like cheating because I had to google how to calculate the XOR of two values, rather than simply having a boolean result.

LeetCode - Island Perimeter (20mins)

I decided to do some LeetCode questions to get better at working with matrices/2D arrays. So, I did this question to start off, and am proud of myself for completing it in 20mins. I solved this question by over over each cell in the row first, and identifying whether or not it was a land cell (i.e if the value in it was 1). If it was, I would add 4 to my perimeter variable, since a cell has 4 sides. Then, seeing as it's a land cell, I checked the cell to the left of the current one on the same row, and it the previous cell was a land, then I subtract 2 from the perimeter. I do the same if the cell above the current one is a land. It took me a second to realize that I needed to subtract the perimeter by 2 when those conditions are met, but then I realized it's because I'm subtracting one side from the current cell, and one side from the previous cell.

[lazar-codes]

03/10/2025

I didn't do much programming today nor did I apply for jobs, but I did do some programming studying and took some notes. But it was a slow day today.

HackerRank - Sherlock and Array (time: 15mins)

Ok, I'm really proud of myself for this one. I figured out that it's a weird version of a sliding window (at least, it is in my head), and after that it was easy. Basically, I calculated the sum of the array, and then iterated over the whole array slowly subtracting the current value from the sum and seeing if at any point the sum of the left and right sides are equal. The tricky part was realizing that the left or right side could technically be out of the array, and it would still count (i.e. the 0th or nth position).

[lazar-codes]

02/10/2025

I did a basic non-coding assessment for a job I applied for and it went a lot better than my previous assessments did. Now hopefully I passed the minimum requirements and can move on with the application.

HackerRank - Grid Challenge (time: 59mins)

I feel really stupid, because this question is actually easy. Remember what I said yesterday about working with 2D arrays and such? Well...I think I need to work on arrays in general because I don't know why my skill in these questions has decreased over time. Oh well. The trick with this one was to have the outer loop terminate when it reaches the length of the word (-1), and not when it reaches the size of the grid. I feel dumb. But I still got it under an hour.

HackerRank - Prime Dates (time: 27mins)

This question involved changing up to 5 lines of pre-made code. The bottleneck for me was understanding what the pre-made code was doing, and having to go over it line by line in my head/on paper to figure out what was going on. But, it went well and I did this in under 30 mins! Not that it matters that much, but it makes me feel good.

[lazar-codes]

01/10/2025

I feel like I'm getting slower at solving problems.

HackerRank - Casear Cipher (time: 40mins)

Despite this one taking me 40 mins, I did find this one to be easy. Most of the time was spent correcting minor mistakes and reading an ASCII table to debug with my notebook. Also, I had to remember to make sure that the shift doesn't exceed the number of letters in the alphabet, but this was done easily by subtracting 26 from the shift number until the shift number is less than 26.

HackerRank - Max Min (time: 40mins)

Once I realized this was a sliding window problem, this because easier. Essentially, I sorted the array first, and prepared my window to be of size k. Then, because I sorted the array, I know that the start of my sliding window is the minimum value in the array, and the end of my window is the maximum, so I just subtracted them and checked to see if that value is less than my current minimum value, and replace it if so.

HackerRank - Dynamic Array (time: 1h20mins)

I'm not joking when I say it took me 30 mins before I understood what the question was asking...great. And by the time I finished it, my eyeballs were burning. At least now I know I need to work more with 2D lists. Anyways, this question is easy once you get passed the confusing wording and figuring out how to work with 2D lists (not arrays...lists), and the question pretty much tells you exactly what to do for the logic.

[lazar-codes]

30/09/2025

I know it's the 1st of October now...I forgot to post this yesterday. But yesterday was not a good programming day, so that's my excuse.

HackerRank - Zig Zag Sequence (time: 31mins)

This was a really weird question, if only because me (and a bunch of other people, according to the Discussions section) think that the code parser on the website is faulty. This question required us to edit preexisting code, but with a maximum of 3 edits/lines to edit. I edited the same lines as a lot of people and yet we're all getting some weird error. So, I'm saying that I completed this in 30mins (I have the correct output as required).

HackerRank - Drawing Book (time: 42mins)

Ok, I did end up looking at the Discussions section for this just quickly, and with the hint of paying attention to the odd page numbers, I moved forward and finished this problem within 5 mins. My original solution was all set up and good to go for all but 1 test case, so I'll still consider that a win. Basically, with this hint, I only increase the number of flips in 2 conditions; the selected page number (p) is closer to the end than the start, and the current page we're on is even. The other case is when the page number is closer to the start than the end, in which case I've set it up where I always flip the page but then divide the total number of flips by 2, since there are 2 pages to one side in a book...

[lazar-codes]

29/09/2025

I started working on my other CV (aka the CV I'm gonna send for research positions), and that's stressing me out...I've forgotten a lot of what I did in my undergrad...

HackerRank - Sales by Match (time: 35mins)

I need to trust myself a lot more...at the start of this problem I thought to myself "Oh, I can probably use a Map for this", but then considered that to be overkill. Well, 30 mins later and I decided to try my Map method, and guessed what worked super easily? Maps are a great way to store the frequency of stuff, and yet I still didn't use it. Plus, it's my favourite data structure...

[lazar-codes]

26/09/2025

HackerRank - Permuting Two Arrays (time: 14mins)

I read the description for this problem and froze up because I have trouble easily understanding math word problems when there are a bunch of symbols. Luckily, after the initial shock I was able to easily solve the problem, though probably not in the correct way. I ended up sorting the lists in numerical order, then started from the lower end of list 1 and the upper end of list 2 and just moved across the lists until the condition dictated by the problem wasn't met. Is this the cheap way of doing it? Probably, but I still solved it.

HackerRank - Subarray Division 1 (time: 39mins)

Ok, this one took longer than the previous one. Oops. After a little too much time had passed I realized that a sliding window is perfect for this type of problem. And then it was easy. So I need to remember that when any question involves contiguous segments, I should always consider a sliding window to solve the problem. It's actually pretty cool, because I first learned about the sliding window 2 years ago, and I somehow still remember how it works...? Go me!

LeetCode - 3sum (time: 2h25m)

I'm combining the time from yesterday and today. I technically had the solution, but exceeded the time limit for the longer questions, so I gave up and looked up an answer. Who knew that adding 1 line of code could make things work faster? Unfortunately, it's still O(n2). They basically want us to have one pointer that will iterate through the list, and then have 2 more pointers iterate over this subarray until they hit the end. It's done more nicely than I explained it, but there you go. At least I understand the logic of it.

[lazar-codes]

25/09/2025

I got my final results for my Master's program, and guess who's graduating with First Class Honours! I spent this whole year panicking and feeling stupid, since the grading system in Ireland is so different from Canada, and I was used to getting much higher grades. But my summer project saved my GPA and I'm so happy it bumped me up to get this award.

LeetCode - Longest Common Prefix (time: 23mins)

I solved this problem back in 2023, but it's obviously been a long time since then so I decided to redo it. It took me around 23mins, but honestly it took me longer to figure out the logic behind it than the actual coding.

I basically sorted the input string array by length of string. Then, I went over the first string's letters, and for each letter I checked all the words in the string to determine if the letter is the same. If it is, I add it to the prefix variable that will be returned by the function. Then I continue to check the letter in each word until the letter is different.

When I did this 2 years ago, I'm pretty sure I gave up and checked someone else's solution, because I don't think I would come up with the answer that I did. So, I'm feeling pretty good that I did this one by myself.

LeetCode - 3sum (time: 1h30mins)

I didn't manage to complete this one, but I have an idea for how to solve it, so that'll be for tmr.

HackerRank - Pangrams (time: 7mins)

I did this one right before bed, and I feel good. Tbh, this one was easy. I basically converted the input string to all lowercase and to a character array, then iterated over the characters. If a character hasn't been added to my results list, then add it, otherwise just move on. Finally, I check the size of my results list. If the size is 26, then it's a pangram. Easy peasy.