Home > Reflections | ⏮️ ⏭️

2024-05-13

🐛 A Terminal Error

🔴 I recently started seeing the following error when trying to open the Linux terminal on my Chromebook:
Launching vmshell failed: Error starting crostini for terminal: 62 (NEED_UPDATE)
🔍 A Google search for this exact error message turned up a Reddit thread recommending a reboot.
♻️ And indeed, a reboot fixed the problem.

🏋🏻 Practice

🎮 I’ve been playing a lot of codingame lately to practice for interviews.
🏇 Clash of Code is a multiplayer feature that presents small programming problems for up to 8 people to compete to solve.
⌛ The problems are supposed to be solvable in about 5 minutes and each problem comes with a time limit of 15 minutes.
⚡ This makes for great practice, as some employers expect candidates to solve problems in about 15 minutes a piece during interviews.
🤔 Recently I came across a particularly challenging problem in Clash of Code that I couldn’t solve during the 15 minute time limit.
💰 The problem was a variant of the Change-making problem, which is a special case of the Knapsack problem.
🧮 These problems are famously hard and can be solved with a technique called Dynamic programming.
🔪 The technique involves breaking the problem into sub problems,
♾️ defining a recursive solution,
🏦 and caching intermediate values to avoid rework.
✏️ It’s been a while since I’ve practice this technique, so I decided to brush up.
📝 I created a new interview-prep git repository and wrote up solutions to a couple of these problems.