Hi Everyone!

Happy New Year!

Tech Dive

Our last tech dives were on Distributed Systems and Database Sharding!

• Distributed Systems Tech Dive

• Database Sharding Tech Dive

Tech Snippets

• Slack wrote an interesting blog post on creating an Analytics Logging Library with React. Lots of interesting insights on sharing data, event logging and static typing. Part 2 of the post is here.

• Google and Snap are in talks to invest $200 million dollars in India’s ShareChat. This would be Snap’s first investment in an Indian startup. ShareChat is a social networking app with over 160 million monthly active users.

• AMD’s desktop CPU share passes Intel’s share for the first time in 15 years. AMD now takes 50.8% of the worldwide desktop CPU market, leading Intel’s 49.2%. However, Intel still dominates in the laptop space (83.8% share) and the server space (98.6% share).

Interview Question

You are given an array of k linked lists.

Each list is sorted in ascending order.

Merge all the linked lists into one sorted linked list and return it.

Here’s the question in LeetCode.

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Previous Solution

As a refresher, here’s the previous question

You are given an unsorted linked list as input. Write a function that removes duplicate items.

Input - 1 -> 2 -> 1 -> 5 -> 2 -> None

Output - 1 -> 2-> 5 -> None

Solution

We can solve this question by using a set.

We traverse the linked list and check if the next node’s value is inside the set.

If it is, then we modify the current node’s next value to cur.next.next ( delete the next node).

Otherwise, we add cur.next’s value to the set and continue traversing the linked list.

Here’s the Python 3 code.