Solve real coding problems
Normally when you want to join strings using a separator, you’d use string.Join(). However, the problem with string.Join() is it doesn’t ignore nulls or empty strings. Take a look at the following examples: If you want to filter out nulls and empty strings, you can filter the list of strings yourself and pass it into … Read more
The fastest and simplest way to remove a set of characters from a string is to use StringBuilder + List<char>, like this: I compared this with three other approaches. I did 100,000 iterations with a string with 2500 characters and a list of 15 characters to remove. This StringBuilder approach is almost 2x faster than … Read more
Problem statement: Given two strings, determine if they have a substring in common. Example: Do “hello world” and “world” have a substring in common? Yes, they both have the substring “world”. Approach What are all the substrings of string? The string “word” is four characters long. It contains 10 substrings between length 1 and 4. … Read more
This article shows code for converting a hex string to a byte array, unit tests, and a speed comparison. First, this diagram shows the algorithm for converting a hex string to a byte array. To convert a hex string to a byte array, you need to loop through the hex string and convert two characters … Read more
Companies like to ask you to solve whiteboard problems during coding interviews. If it’s an in-person interview, they’ll ask you to solve the problem on a physical whiteboard. If it’s a remote interview, they’ll either have you solve the problem on a website like HackerRank, or they’ll ask you the question in a “digital whiteboard” … Read more
Problem statement: Given a 32-bit signed integer, how many set bits are there? Ex: The number 15 has four bits set. In this article I’ll explain how I’d approach this problem. Approach How do I know if a bit is set? A bit can either be 0 or 1. A bit is set if its … Read more
One day I decided to challenge myself by trying to implement multithreaded quicksort. I wanted to see how it would compare to the built-in sort function – Array.Sort(). I came up with two algorithms that were 2-4x faster than Array.Sort(): Top-down: divide-fork-sort-merge Bottom-up: quicksort with fork-on-recursion After continuing to tinker, in attempts to further optimize, … Read more
