Posts on Kumar Shubham

The Right Time

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 11:01:42 +0530

I am going to start this post with a question.

Is there ever a right time to do something?

“I want to lose weight. Maybe I’ll start in the new year.”

“I should go to the gym. I’ll start next Monday.”

“I have this startup idea. I’ll work on it this weekend.”

“There’s an opportunity to move to a new city. Let me think about it and consult my family first.”

The Compound Effect

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 21:23:22 +0530

While I was walking with my friend today, I was discussing my long run. I told him that 2 months ago, when I hadn’t started my marathon training block, I was questioning my decision of going for runs, waking up early, and still maintaining my routine. Over the past 2-3 months, there were other things I could have focused on, but I stuck with my schedule, trusting it would be worth it.

The Cost of Discipline

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 10:30:24 +0530

I was running a build on my computer and while it was running, I decided to start writing this post.

Discipline

The practice of training people to obey rules and behave well

Honestly, the moment I saw this definition, especially the part “the practice of training people”, I thought to myself, well this can only go so far.

Can you actually train someone to be disciplined or is it something that you are born with or something that you develop over time?

Gratitude

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 17:26:06 +0530

definition:

the feeling of being grateful or of wanting to give your thanks to somebody

Gratitude is a powerful thing. It can change the way you think, the way you feel, and the way you live. It can make you appreciate the little things in life and make you feel happy, even in the toughest of times.

The past few months have been a rollercoaster ride. I worked on launching a new product at work, met new people, saw new places, lived life a little off the edge, and started marathon training with a sub-3:30 goal.

Problem Solving 101 [0]

Sat, 24 Apr 2021 17:34:34 +0530

We’ll be starting a series to improve our problem solving skills:

We’ll discuss the following problems in this stream:

1. Codeforces 306A #

You are given string s. Your task is to determine if the given string s contains two non-overlapping substrings "AB" and "BA" (the substrings can go in any order).

Input
The only line of input contains a string s of length between 1 and 105 consisting of uppercase Latin letters.

Output
Print "YES" (without the quotes), if string s contains two non-overlapping substrings "AB" and "BA", and "NO" otherwise.

2. Write a function that takes a list of strings an prints them, one per line, in a rectangular frame. For example the list [“Hello”, “World”, “in”, “a”, “frame”] gets printed as: #

*********
* Hello *
* World *
* in    *
* a     *
* frame *
*********

3. Write a function that merges two sorted lists into a new sorted list. [1,4,6],[2,3,5] → [1,2,3,4,5,6]. You can do this quicker than concatenating them followed by a sort. #

4. Balanced Parentheses (easy) #

Given a string str of length N, consisting of ‘(‘ and ‘)‘ only, the task is to check whether it is balanced or not.
Examples:

Input: str = “((()))()()” 
Output: Balanced

Input: str = “())((())” 
Output: Not Balanced

5. Given N points in the form (x,y) find if a rectangle can be formed with the given points #

Togetherness of a Family: A tree problem

Sun, 10 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

About the Problem #

The problem is a typical tree problem:

In the world of magic land, there is a park in which a group of people are playing a game. Every person in the group is a child of one another person in the group except one person who is the parent of all the people in the group. Here, each person is represented by a number that if there are ‘n’ persons in the group then they are represented by numbers 1 to 7. The direct and indirect child relationship is defined as follows:
(i) A person ‘b’ is said to be direct child of ‘a’ if ‘a’ is parent of ‘b’.
(ii) Person is ‘c’ is said to be indirect child of ‘a’ when ‘c’ is child of ‘b’ and ‘b’ is child of ‘a’.
(iii) A indirect child ‘i’ of a person ‘p’ is also an indirect child of parent of ‘p’.
In the game, everyone is given a token which has a number written on it and to test the togetherness of the family, the family is given some queries.
In one query, a number representing a person is given and it is asked to find the number of direct and indirect children of the person who have prime number in the token given to them.
For more clarifications see the example below.
There are seven person in the group and the tokens assigned to each of them are:
Person
Token Number
1
1
2
2
3
3
4
4
5
5
6
6
7
7
We are given 2 queries:
Query1: The person numbered as 1 is given and we need to findout the number of children(both direct and indirect under 1) which have a token with prime number value:
Answer: 4.
Explanation:
For the person numbered as 1, its direct children are persons numbered as 2 and 3 and they have tokens 2 and 3 respectively which are prime numbers.
The person numbered as 5 and 7 are also children (indirect) of the person number 1 hence they also added up to the count and hence there are a total of 4 people who are children of person number 1 and have a prime number token.
Query2: The person numbered as 6 is given
Answer: 0.
Explanation:
The person with number 6 has no children and hence there are 0 children under him having tokens with prime number values.
Input Format:
First line of the input contains N, the number of persons playing in the park
Second line contains token numbers assigned for the persons and they are separated by a space ith number in the line contains the value of the token assigned to the ith person.
Next N-1 lines contains two integers Xi and Yi separated by a space and indicates that Xi is the parent of Yi.
The next line contains the number of queries, Q
Next Q lines contain the person queried

As soon as we read the problem, we see that it screams trees, as a parent child hierarchical relationship, can be best represented using graphs.

Software Testing Conference 2019

Mon, 16 Dec 2019 22:07:28 +0530

Architect Continous Quality

Me and some of the folks from AppDynamics Bangalore Office went to STC 2019, organized by QAI to attend this two day long conference. The conference covered a range of topics from the domain of Software Testing, including RPA to application of AI/ML to solve interesting problems in Software Testing. I am going to list down the talks which I attended and the key take-aways from that talk. So let’s go 🙂

A Bytecode Week

Fri, 17 May 2019 13:27:03 +0530

final InsnList list = new InsnList();
list.add(new LdcInsnNode(new Integer(100)); // Load Constant instruction
list.add(new MethodInsnNode(Opcodes.INVOKESTATIC, "java/lang/Thread", "sleep", "(J)V", false)); // Invoke the method
// Look something like a stack machine? That's right, its the JVM bytecode.

How many of us, do really study subjects like microprocessor, thinking that we are gonna use this knowledge further in our day to day job? I too was with that mindset in the college, but as you can see and will get to know further, these things have re-appeared 🤯🤯

MacOS Mojave Review (Developer Beta)

Tue, 26 Jun 2018 16:43:59 +0530

Hi everyone,

So this blog post is basically about the first impressions of the macOS mojave which is currently in developer beta.

At first when I installed the beta it asks which appearance would you like to choose? Dark (obvious, eh), after all, this was one of the biggest features for which I wanted to try out MacOS Mojave.

After the OS boots up, I did feel a bit of changes in animations here and there, also some things opened up quicker than before.

We are all in a Bubble

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 19:26:51 +0530

Hi everyone,

This is not a particular blog post, this is just what I feel about right now, considering the environment around me.

I am just sick of how we are affected by the peer group around us. It completely changes us sometimes for good, and sometimes for bad. The point here is that in this group dynamic, are you the influencer or the influenced?

I truly feel/know that what I am now, is not what I used to be a year ago. I’ll just simply share what’s going on in the story. Consider a character Kumar and how his college life begins.