I Solved Hundreds of LeetCode Problems.

I solved hundreds of LeetCode problems (user: dhtmlkitchen). I would solve the daily problem, then create a write up on LeetCode (because if you can’t explain it, you don’t really understand it that well yourself). Next, I would take screenshots of my code, copy the problem description, and post the problem with my screenshots on LinkedIn. 

After several months of doing this, I built up a following of about 155 followers.

LinkedIn Sucks

But LinkedIn groups were full of spam and many low-quality posts. Recruiters aren’t there looking to see who’s the best of the best because it’s all spam and low-quality posts. And for the spam, the only actions LinkedIn Trust & Safety take are against the user who reported, blocking and restricting the reporter and leaving the spam.

Johnson & Johnson & Getting Banned

LinkedIn kept feeding me Johnson and Johnson ads, which is a bit of a sore spot for me. So, I broke my rule of posting only professionally-related things on LinkedIn and posted a comment in the comment box of the J&J ads LinkedIn was targetting me with. 

The comment was to the effect that my mother used Johnson and Johnson shower to shower talc products for the 20 years leading up to her diagnosis with leiomyosarcoma, caused by those products[1].

Johnson and Johnson recently settled a massive lawsuit for these products. However, because leiomyosarcoma is so rare, it was not listed on the lawsuit and I was excluded as a plaintiff.

I was very careful to remain within the guidelines of LinkedIn’s terms.

However, after that, LinkedIn deleted my account.

Interview Prep Matters…

I failed my 2009 Google interview after failing to solve Product of Array Except Self. It’s a challenging dynamic programming problem but once you know how to solve it, it’s not that hard.

…For the Interview

Only a small percentage of technical interview prep has direct practical relevance to the tasks I’ve performed as a Frontend engineer. Some algorithmic problems I’ve had to address as a front end engineer involve n-ary trees, graphs, strings and arrays, which appear on LeetCode. Other algorithms I’ve had to tackle do not. For example, I’ve never seen colorimetry problems on LeetCode.

Other front-end problems involve design patterns, data sanitization strategies, and using strategies to deal with a dynamic deployment environment (web browsers).

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8106926/#T3

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