My answer to a young programmer

You maybe know that I offer C++ mentoring via Twitter (DMs are open!) and, as it happened, someone approached me and wanted to be mentored. So I asked him for his questions and then wrote some responses, which ended up to to be qute long... Then the idea to share what I wrote in this blog - maybe someonw will find it interesing.

Without much ado, to the questions.

1. Questions

I first asked about the goals. Thes answers are probably in line with many young programmers want:

1. I just need to be able to solve programming problems and strong myself in
this part, to be qualified for big tech companies interviews like Google,
Microsoft and Amazon. 

2. No the programming language doesn't matter for me, I know the basics of C, C++ and Python but I just want to be a problem solver and think like a programmer 

3.  I just want to understand the theory behind Algorithms and Data Structure

Then also came a list of resources that one finds on the internet using uncle Google. I won't show them here, as thea are quoted in the response.

2 The Response

Here's my response, in full, without any later editing:

Hi Xyz!

I had a look at your references:

>Courses:

>Algorithms and Data structures by Revi
>https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEbnTDJUr_IeHYw_sfBOJ6gk5pie0yP-0

Here we have much complexity theory but little of algos - only basic sorting methods.

>Algorithms by Abdul Bari
>https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDN4rrl48XKpZkf03iYFl-O29szjTrs_O

Don't know what to think about it's TOC - maybe too academic (too much about recurrences) but also covers a broad range of themes you'll need. So-so.

>MIT 6.006 Introduction to Algorithms
>https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP61Oq3tWYp6V_F-5jb5L2iHb

Had a look the TOC and liked it! If you can grasp these themes, you'll have good working knowledge of Comp.Sci.

>Books:

>Data Structures and Program Design in C by Robert L. Kruse
>https://goodreads.com/book/show/27846.Data_Structures_and_Program_Design_in_C

Looks like it's pretty old. Probably outdated, looks like waste of time.

>Introduction to Algorithms By Thomas H. Cormen
>https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/introduction-algorithms-third-edition

This is a classic, maybe a little heavy on the academic side, but a good reference to check what the options are. For an algorithms book the "The Algorithm Design Manual" by Steven Skiena is a much lighter read I'd recommed!

>Think Like a Programmer by V. Anton Spraul
>https://goodreads.com/book/show/13590009-think-like-a-programmer

I don't know this one. Had a look at the TOC and it can be OK or even good. It has a couple of programming problems but the title seems to be kind of a clickbait. Notheless. maybe it's good.

>Practice:

>https://hackerrank.com

Don't know this one (sorry) and couldn't check it out, as it requires a login. Back in the day Google recommended topcoder.com for testing your problem-solving skills in competitions, but I don't know the current status of it.

>https://leetcode.com

Don't know this one (sorry), but it looks somehow inetersting at first glance. You have specific questions for Google, Facebook, etc. Could be worth it.

And responses:

>I just need to be able to solve programming problems and strong myself in this part, to be qualified for big tech companies interviews like Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

A classic book for that is "Cracking the Coding Interview" by Gyle Laakmann McDowell - but it's a real tome! "Programming Interviews Exposed" by J. Morgan et. all was a lighte read. "Algorithms for Intreviews" by A. Aziz & A. Prakesh has many tough problems, but the solutions aren't that well explained - a challenge!

>Q1: No the programming language doesn't matter for me, I know the basics of C, C++ and Python but I just want to be a problem solver and think like a programmer

To be a (real) problem solver you need some deep knowledge in at leas one OO-langauge! Programmers think in patterns, you have to learn them by solving programming problems! On a little higher level, you'll need at least cursory knowledge in design patterns - look at the 4 Amigos book!

>Q2: I just want to understand the theory behind Algorithms and Data Structure

You'll have to undertstand the O-notation at least and to be able to estimate the O-complexity of your algoriths. The Master theorem is not really needed though. You have at least to understand NP-complete complexity class (NP=P?). You'll have to be able to estimate run time of an algorithm - which algos would need thousands of years to complete?

Regards,
Marek

3. Summing Up

Hopefully some young programmer(s) will find it helpful!

Trip Report Qt Word Summit, Berlin, 5-6 November 2019

You've probably noticed that I'm not a hell of a conference goer, didn't you? The last conference I attended was the first "Meeting C++" conference in 2014, at that time still taking place in Neuss, Rhineland* instead of the worldly and hipster Berlin.

I tried to go to the two consecutive Meeting C++ conferences in Berlin, but I was both times unable to do it, so eventually I gave up and called it a day on this idea.

But because recently I got somehow more seriously involved with the Qt framework** I thought, hey, why not just go to this one Qt conference*** in Berlin and visit some of my people there as well? No sooner thought than done. And now, three months something later, another idea struck me - why not write up some impressions? So let us go over things I came to remember most vividly.

Of course you could start moaning that it is much toooo late for a trip report, but better late than sorry, so let us begin!

1. Lars Knoll's talk

Lars Knoll, the CTO of the Qt Company was giving a talk on general directions for the future Qt 6 development and it was rather interesting. You can check it out here (PDF), but basically QML will be reworked to be a typed programming language, Javascript will be only optional and graphics will support not only OpenGL but also newer APIs like Vulcan, Metal or Direct3D 12. All that's very interesting, but what struck me the most was the following slide:

As it seems Qt is predominantly used on Windows! That's kind of surprising, taking into account that all the books and articles you read always assume Linux as a platform! I personally did a lot of Qt work on Windows and couldn't ever understand that.

This slide gave me a nice, fuzzy feeling, because my decision to write my Qt book from a point of view of a Windows developer was a right one!

Other books always describe the tooling you can use on Linux, but this doesn't help me on Windows, because most of that tooling (open source) doesn't exist there. So writing of the Chapter 2 (Profiling and Profilers) was a kind of a discovery journey - how can I make open source tooling run and correctly work on Windows?

2. Keynotes

As much as I don't like keynotes - normally they are rather full of business-y bla bla - but one slide of the Natalie Nahai's presentation really impressed me, I mean this one:

Un ejemplo de @NathalieNahai de mejora de #UX: Más donaciones solo por cambiar la página: los botones, Obama mirando los botones.. En #QtWs19 pic.twitter.com/th2eC527q8

— fgutierrez (@fgutierrez_) November 5, 2019

You can see the change of the vibes of a webpage from the left (boring, lots of distractions, unusable!) to right (cool, clear, using 1-click donation buttons). Nice! And it really happened during Obama's campaign.

3. Caliatys hydrogen mobility talk

This one was also a keynote (or I think so...) but the CTO of the company has shown us the slide containing a decision table they used for choosing the Qt framework as a platform for mobile development. The application in question should run on both iPhone and Android device. After the recent switch of Dropbox away from a commonn C++ codebase for both platforms you would maybe expect that C++ isn't good for mobile.

See their reasons for choosing Qt in the pic below:

The cloud connector had to be written separately for each platform, apart from this Qt provided for platform-independence!

4. QML on Microcontrollers

I already said, that the new QML will be a compiled, statically typed language in Qt 6. Already today, we can have a foretaste of the future with Qt Quick Ultralite (Qt QUL) that can be run on MCUs (microcontrollers) - a feat in itself, as up to this day Qt and QML needed a much more beefy processors to be run onto! There were quite a few talks centering around that theme, because it seems to be the future of Qt.

Qt Quick Ultralite is thus basically a subset of QML which can be compiled to C++ and run on bare metal (or an RTOS). This is also a direction in which QML will be going in Qt 6. I was pleasently surprised to learn, that Qt QUL was developed by the Qt Company in cooperation with a polish enterprise that ported it to many MCUs (see the picture below 👇).

As it's my native country, I couldn't help but to be very pleased. Good job Poland! 😍

5. People and stories

As it goes, I stumbled upon 2 of my old clients at the conference! I tool the opportunity and asked them about how my old projects fared after I left. We had quite good chats and I wanted to talk to them on the next day also, but - you won't believe it - I couldn't spot them anymore! The conference is a pretty big event with masses of people and finding someone is rather matter of luck.

I also could (and was honored to) meet some, i.e. two 🙂, Qt-involved people, I only knew from Twitter, in the real world. As I expected. they turned out to be very nice indeed! Plus I also wound up talking to people in the queue to the canteen and at the exhibitor stands - I even could ask Qt's CTO a question face-to-face after his talk.

Now let us proceed to the "stories" part of this section:

One of my customers I met at the venue told me a nice story right form the threnches, They had a beast of a performance problem with the embedded device in my old project (accidentally same project as in the perf. story 6.4 in the book**), namely, after a day being powered on, the device started to slow down up to a total grind - the UI became totally unresponsive and you had to reboot it. What is your guess for the reason of that?

Yes, you are right, a memory leak.

But you'll never guess what couse it! When displaying the time of the day, on every update (i.e. every second) the displayed string was changed and then restyled using CSS styles. As it turned out, there was a bug in the Qt version we used and restyling leaked memory at that place! How could you possibly find that?!?!, I asked, quite shocked. Well, it was accomplished by the old and proven method of pinching off parts of the programm until the problem disappears. A kind of "divide and conquer" of debugging. The solution? Quite a pragmatic one - just don't use styling in the updates. Unfortunaltely, I forgot to ask how's the look and feel of the widget now.

Want another story? Here we go - I met 2 guys in the queue in the canteen and chattet with them for quite a long time. At the evening, I went out with my Berlin people to their favourite craft beer bar in the neighbourhood. After a couple of pints I catched a glimple of some guy at the counter and had to ask myself - do I know that guy? No, impossible, only locals frequent this bar... But after a couple of further glimpses I just had to settle that and chatted up the guy and his friend. Guess what - they were the exact people I met at the conference. Then we had one more chat and I even could pitch my book** to them! Moral - everybody can google, there isn't such a thing like a hidden gem or an insider-only venue. 😔

6. Merchandise

Of course I also got some merchandise:

• a Qt sticker set 📗,
• a T-shirt and a lanyard keychain from Qt 👉,
• sleeping mask (Batman style!) 🦇, also from Qt,
• some small stickers from exhibitor companies 

But not that much I'd expect. There was a raffle where you could win a cool drone (sponsored by one of the exhibitors), but this time I was kinda outta luck.

7. Summing up

You tell me - do you think it was a good conference? The main lecture hall was very impressive in any case. An you could see the Berlin TV-tower right out of the window.

---
* early supporter! 🙋

** see this book: https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/hands-high-performance-programming-qt-5

*** i.e. to the Qt World Summit conference. BTW, here are all QtWS-2019 videos to watch: https://resources.qt.io/qt-world-summit-2019