Exploring DevOps and DSA: Insights from Days 13 to 16

🛠️ Day 13-14: Terraform Basics

Spent time learning Terraform – its fundamentals, use cases, and how it simplifies infrastructure provisioning. Understanding Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is crucial for DevOps, and Terraform stands out due to its declarative approach.

🛑 Day 15: A Break Day

Taking a break to reset. Sometimes, stepping away helps to come back stronger.

🔍 Day 16: Binary Search Exploration & More

Today’s focus was Binary Search, and it was an eye-opener. This was my first deep dive into applying binary search in various problems outside of college assignments. It’s fascinating how this simple yet powerful algorithm can be used in multiple ways.

✅ Problems Solved:

1. Binary Search (Easy) 🔍

   • Classic implementation of binary search on a sorted array.

2. Search a 2D Matrix (Medium) 🔢

   • Searching efficiently in a matrix where rows and columns are sorted.

3. Koko Eating Bananas (Medium) 🍌

   • A fun binary search problem where we determine the minimum eating speed for Koko to finish all bananas within a given time.

4. Find Minimum in Rotated Sorted Array (Medium) 🔄

   • Identifying the minimum element in a rotated sorted array using binary search.

5. Search in Rotated Sorted Array (Medium) 🔎

   • Searching for a target value in a rotated sorted array in O(log n) time.

6. Time-Based Key-Value Store (Medium) ⏳

   • Implementing a time-based key-value storage system that supports retrieval of values based on timestamps, using binary search for efficiency.

7. Median of Two Sorted Arrays (Hard) 📊

   • A tricky problem requiring an optimized approach to find the median of two sorted arrays in O(log (m+n)) time.

   • This was challenging, and even after referring to NeetCode’s video, I solved it but wasn’t fully satisfied with my approach. Will revisit this later for better understanding.

🔧 Other Progress:

Alongside DSA, I made good progress on another project – a Node.js backend service for an Android app. Excited to see how it shapes up!

🎯 Key Takeaways:

• Binary Search has a wider range of applications than I initially thought.

• Hard problems require multiple perspectives and deeper analysis.

• Balancing DevOps learning, DSA, and development is crucial for steady progress.

It was a productive day, and progress was made! Looking forward to more challenges ahead.