The Overwatch League had been months of ups and downs. I’ve witnessed multiple teams improve, and also teams going downhill very quickly. There was also a particular team that had never even won a single match. Hopefully Season 2 will bring the spirits of the Shanghai Dragons back up and allow them to break the curse of the losing streak.

Over the course of a few months that I’ve followed the league, I really enjoyed watching my favourite team, NYXL successfully make their presence within the league. Every single player within the NYXL is extremely talented, and I hope that over these few months of practice and also the world cup games, NYXL will comeback and be a stronger team for the upcoming season.

Overall the OWL had been a wonderful journey for me as I’ve been watching the league and going through multiple stages of my own life. Over the time that OWL was going on, I was able to find a job, move to a new place and now starting my career. I will not miss a single match up next season and also can’t wait till I get to watch the world cup!

Cheers!

Jen~

My favorite team when we first started out was Seoul Dynasty as most of the World Cup Team Korea members were in that team. Unfortunately throughout the OWL season they’ve been spiraling down on an unsuccessful lose streak. Seoul had Jehong playing Tank for a little at the end of Stage 3, which was a huge ????? and then finally have him back in stage 4. I thought that was extremely bizarre from Seoul. Overall, Seoul had been an absolute let down, but I hope some of the players that are in the team will perform a lot better when playing in the South Korean world cup team.

On the other hand, my favorite team now is NYXL, as it’s always a performance watching them play. Pine is a player that I really enjoy watching all the time, especially when he pops off on the enemy team. NYXL had been playing in an extremely consistent manner (except for stage 4’s current week of course… are they just playing however(?)). I hope that NYXL wins OWL Season 1, and hopefully one day in the next season, I will be able to watch one of the matches live!

I really enjoy the OWL, and leave a comment below on your favorite players and teams!

~Jen~

Been a while since my past tech post, and I just would like to discuss a little more on a recent article that I’ve read in regards to Instagram releasing how their algorithm works. As a regular user of the app, I’ve also always wondered how Instagram is able to always appeal to me whenever I open up the app. I see updates from my favourite Overwatch League Team, to my favourite clothing brand. Why does it always seem to do a good job at keeping me scrolling whenever I open the app?

Instagram had been using machine learning on my past behaviour, and with machine vision, recognizing what my interests were. They also make sure that they show you people that you care about / visit the most are shown first before anyone else, which is what keeps me scrolling! The algorithm’s ability to personalize the feed with the user’s interactions and interests really amazes me.

Machine learning is starting to become a huge trend in the current consumer market. You can see this new technology integrated in so many areas of your life, including banking, shopping for clothes, or even buying things on amazon. I personally love the topic of machine learning and would love to dig deeper into learning the intricacies of how it actually works!

~Jen~

It’s been a month or two since my last post, and I would like to quickly give an update on what I’ve been up to over the past two months.

Over the month of April, I was busy with studying for final exams and also went on a trip to Iceland! I will definitely be writing a more detailed post on my trip to Iceland but it was an amazing trip as it was my very first time travelling to a European country. My family and I toured the whole country within a week by following the scenic highway. Unfortunately, end of April was when the northern lights “show” ends, so I did not get to see that, but I enjoyed this trip very much and will definitely go back again in a different season!

May was an awesome month as I got the chance to visit Banff and Jasper during my trip to visit my boyfriend in Alberta! It was interesting comparing the mountains and lakes to the ones in Iceland. Overall I had a wonderful time experiencing nature in Canada as well.

The upcoming month is going to be one of the most life changing moments for me as I will be officially graduating from Western University and starting a new chapter of my life. I will be officially moving to Downtown Toronto for my job beginning in July and I am really looking forward to this new opportunity!

I will be keeping my blog up to date starting from now on so that all my updates will be recent! Hope you all enjoyed this post, and see you in my next blog post.

~Jen~

1. Master of None
2. The View (Talk show)
3. The Real (Talk show)
4. Stephen Colbert (I watch a lot of talk shows I know… lol)
5. Jimmy Kimmel
6. Jarvis Johnson

and of course a lot more on youtube! Hope you would enjoy these as much as I do everyday!

Here is the list of my advice:

• Resume:

Make sure that you have your resume looked through by people that you trust. Reformatting your resume can make a big difference in getting that interview that you want! A lot of places don’t let you apply again until a few months later, so definitely keep in mind to polish that resume!

• Know Thy Self!

Study your resume and make sure that you know how to explain everything on your resume with detail. If you cannot explain something, then either leave it out or make sure its not the most eye catching thing on your resume. When I first started job search, I’ve choked on explaining my projects to the interviewer and that immediately leaves a bad impression!

• Preparing for the interviews:

Behavioral Interview Preparations –

Practice, Practice, Practice!! Make sure you’ve got all the “Tell me about yourself?”, “What are your strengths and weaknesses”, “Why x company?”, etc questions down for every single interview! These questions are almost always asked and by the end of the interview period every time this question was asked, my brain automatically answers!

Technical Interview Preparations –

If you are interviewing for a development position like I was, make sure to read through my blog posts: Software Engineering Technical Interview Prep & Time Complexity and Interview Tips

Also make sure to do Mock interviews with all your peers as that will help you the most. Your peers will be able to give you useful feedback on how you can improve!

• Don’t be afraid

You will never feel 100% ready for these technical interviews. That is the truth and everyone feels the same so don’t chicken out! Make sure you apply to all the available job postings out there and then keep practicing. Some employers take almost 1 month after your application to get back to you!

Some sites you should visit to look for job opportunities:

1. Indeed.com
2. Monster.ca
3. company career sites
4. Glassdoor (also very important when you practice for your upcoming interview)
5. LinkedIn

• Stay calm and power pose!

Before your interviews, make sure you breathe! If you’ve gotten an interview, that means the recruiter had already picked you out of thousands of resumes that were submitted to the posting, and would like to learn a little more about you. So relax and breathe before the interview! Make sure you do some power poses. Study has shown that it’s extremely helpful!

• Fail, Fail, Fail!

If you did not get the job, get up and start on that process again. If a job comes too easily, you will not know how to treasure an opportunity, nor work hard for one! Take this as a useful experience, learn from it. If you are able to ask the recruiter that sent you the rejection for a reason, email them! Use that feedback and reflect on the things you’ve done wrong. I’ve personally experienced at least 10 rejections myself, and those experiences also helped me learn about the interview processes better!

• Don’t give up

KEEP APPLYING!!! Until you get that offer, don’t stop applying to the jobs! Over last year, I was flown out to an interview and was discouraged after finding out that I never got the job. Rejections can hurt, but get up and keep your head up high! Keep interviewing and applying to other opportunities!

GOOD LUCK!!!

Feel free to ask any questions about job interviews on the comments section below!

Boston Dynamics is a company that creates Robots that can mimic movements in an extremely agile manner. They recently just posted a video of a robot helping another fellow robot by opening the door for it. If you’ve not seen the video of Atlas jumping…. I highly recommend it as it definitely freaked me out!

The way these robots move really shows how much technology is able to advance into in the future. Boston Dynamics had constantly been putting out their technologies on YouTube, and its really interesting to follow their YouTube channel. I already imagine in the next 20 to 30 years, having a robot helper walking around in the house to help me with chores and making breakfast in the morning etc!

What do you think about these technologies? Let me know in the comments below!

Leetcode –  Product of Array Except Self:

Given an array of n integers where n > 1, nums, return an array output such that output[i] is equal to the product of all the elements of nums except nums[i].

Solve it without division and in O(n).

For example, given [1,2,3,4], return [24,12,8,6].

My Solution:

1. Clarify if the question is going to be sorted order or if there is any sort of different.
2. Test cases are as in the question
3. The solution is to observe that all the elements are multiplied on the left and right, then we can basically multiply the two sides to get the final answer. So in our solution, we first store the left multiplied elements into an array, then we make sure that we multiply the right with the elements already in that array to get the total. O(n) time complexity, O(1) space complexity.

4.  public int[] productExceptSelf(int[] nums) {
         int n = nums.length;
         int[] res = new int[n];
         
         // left side
         int left = 1;
         for(int i = 0; i  0){
                 left = left * nums[i - 1];
             }
             res[i] = left;
         }
         
         // right side
         int right = 1;
         for(int i = n - 1; i >=0; i--){
             if(i < n-1){
                 right = right * nums[i+1];
             }
             res[i] *= right;
         }
           return res;
       }
   

Because of the harsh weather conditions, the drone team at Intel had to make sure that the drones are still able to coordinate and not fly off course! The results are stunning… just see the pictures I’ve pulled from various websites below:

This of course is not the first time that Intel has shown off its drones, as I’ve seen it at the Superbowl as well when Lady Gaga was performing! It was a beautiful sight and I think that it really showcases what you can do with technology! What are your thoughts about the light show? Comment in the section below and let me know!

Leetcode – Top K Frequent Words:

Given a non-empty list of words, return the k most frequent elements.

Your answer should be sorted by frequency from highest to lowest. If two words have the same frequency, then the word with the lower alphabetical order comes first.

Example 1:

Input: ["i", "love", "leetcode", "i", "love", "coding"], k = 2
Output: ["i", "love"]
Explanation: "i" and "love" are the two most frequent words.
    Note that "i" comes before "love" due to a lower alphabetical order.

Example 2:

Input: ["the", "day", "is", "sunny", "the", "the", "the", "sunny", "is", "is"], k = 4
Output: ["the", "is", "sunny", "day"]
Explanation: "the", "is", "sunny" and "day" are the four most frequent words,
    with the number of occurrence being 4, 3, 2 and 1 respectively.

Note:

1. You may assume k is always valid, 1 ≤ k ≤ number of unique elements.
2. Input words contain only lowercase letters.

Follow up:

1. Try to solve it in O(n log k) time and O(n) extra space.

My Solution:

1. We need to first clarify all the edge cases with the interviewer, and make sure that you know the output is a list of strings that appear kth most frequently. We are returning all the most frequent elements from K.
2. Test Cases are as above, but also [“the”], k = 2 , [], k = 1, etc
3. First solution that came to mind is to store all the elements and their frequencies into a HashMap! Key will be the String itself and Integer is the number of times it appears in the array. Problem with this solution is that we can’t exactly sort the keys in the HashMap intuitively since there is no straight forward built in method that does that for us. Instead, we need to implement a sort on our own on the keys within the HashMap, then we print out the kth elements. The solution should give us O(n log n) time as populating the array is n time, and the sort method will take O(n log n), then repopulating the resulting array which can go up to k elements O(k) time, and O(n) space for using a hashmap and list depending on the sizes of words array.

4. public List topKFrequent(String[] words, int k) {
           HashMap map = new HashMap();
           List result = new ArrayList();
           
           if(words.length == 0 || k > words.length){
               return result;
           }
           
           for(int i = 0; i = 0; i--){
               if(a > 0){
               result.add((String)list.get(i).getKey());
               a--;
               }
           }     
           return result;
           }
   

See you in the next practice!