Most of my week was devoted to a brain teaser which used to be my job. I hand crafted a solution to a LeetCode problem classified as “hard” difficulty. After about 40 hours of effort, I finished the solution and LeetCode accepted it. Even though code as a profession is dead, it felt great getting into a flow state on this problem. I will do more of these in the future, strictly as a means of staying sharp mentally.

FIRE: Day 99 (10/5)

Gym, Spanish, Tech.

I keep hearing about LeetCode and the coding problems the site has. These are the problems that big tech will often use in their interviews. I decided to try one out as a mental exercise, and it ate up my whole day. I picked a problem labeled “hard” – finding the median value of two sorted arrays. It has various constraints you have to follow that make it more difficult than it sounds. I could write the code in an inefficient way and be done in under a half hour, but it would fail the efficiency constraint.

This problem had to be tackled differently than I normally would. I had a mostly working fast solution by the end of the day after 4-5 hours. Claude reviewed my solution and ran a suite of over 2,000 fuzz tests on it, and found many failing cases. I’ll work on that more tomorrow.

Even though humans won’t be writing code any more, I’m not sure there’s a better mental workout than writing code.

FIRE: Day 100 (10/6)

Gym, Spanish, Tech.

I continued on with solving the code problem from yesterday. Squashing the remaining failures is becoming difficult under my approach, but I’m still making progress. I must have spent another 3-4 hours on this today.

My dental deep cleaning was today. I wanted to throat punch the hygienist. She is from eastern Europe by the sound of her accent. She said “lots of bone loss” looking at my x-ray, which is not how my dentist characterized it. It’s like she was waiting for a response, and I didn’t give one to her. The only thing I would have had to say is “ummm yeah, want me to grow it back?”.

She asked about my at-home routine, so I told her all of my thorough procedures. I added the caveat that when they saw me last, I had just returned from a year of international travel with only a toothbrush and floss, and they caught my mouth at its worst. She said “oh really, a toothbrush and floss should be enough no?”. That’s the point where I imagined throat punching her. If they came and watched my home care they could see it’s not lack of skill and effort – it’s that I’m not winning genetics of the mouth.

As she started cleaning, I think she wanted a take-back on being a dick. She became much nicer, probably after she saw that yes, here in America, I can and did in fact reverse my gum inflammation. Also probably I impressed her because I’m the most bad-ass patient she’s ever seen. I declined the numbing shots, and opted only for Novacane that lasted for about 20 minutes of the 45 minute procedure. I didn’t flinch once, and she commented on my pain tolerance as we were walking to the front desk.

In the evening we watched the high school girls volleyball game, and BC and I did our reading routine.

FIRE: Day 101 (10/7)

I went to the gym despite it being Wednesday, in order to free up tomorrow for a hike that JC and I are planning. I also did Spanish, and then the rest of my day was spent on the LeetCode problem I’ve been working on solving.

FIRE: Day 102 (10/8)

JC and I were going to go on a hike to see the fall colors at a state park, but she was asked to sub last minute. It was for a teacher she likes that has a great class, so we’ll save the hike for another day.

I did Spanish, and then the entire rest of the day I worked on the LeetCode problem.

FIRE: Day 103 (10/9)

Gym, Spanish, Tech.

I spent another entire day on this LeetCode problem. The new approach is working much better but I’m still squashing edge cases trying to get it to pass Claude’s 200K fuzz tests. It’s at about a 95% pass rate.

AC and I went to “Friday Night Live” put on by the theater department at her high school. It was an SNL format and was pretty good. The skits were hit and miss, but that’s true of SNL as well.

FIRE: Day 104 (10/10)

My run went well this morning. I started at my usual 9:13/mile pace, ran mile 2 at 8:30, and then had to back off to 9:13 for the third mile.

I spent another 4-5 hours on the LeetCode problem and keep getting closer but I still have some cases to clean up.

We had FAC, and it was AC’s movie pick. She chose Hadestown which was ok.

FIRE: Day 105 (10/11)

We went to visit my mom today, which is about a two hour drive away. I forced the kids to raw dog the drive rather than listening to something along the way. It’s a good skill to be able to sit with your thoughts for a couple hours.

We ate a lot of food, watched the Broncos game, and saw my cousin’s family when they came over to the house. My cousin was trying to talk me into building an app that he needs at work. He was pitching it as a huge windfall if it worked, and that I’d be able to live abroad rather than just visiting.

It just made me think he’s pretty dumb. There’s no reason they would pay a lot for an app that makes them a little more efficient in the field. Also if I could build it, so could their company. I decided not to split hairs that what we did was living internationally. Nor did I mention that if we wanted to, we could leave the US right now and permanently live abroad.