Growth Notes: 12th October 2025 - 19th October 2025

Problem Solving

Some problems that I solved on Codeforces:

1. A2114. Square Year
2. B2092. Lady Bug
3. B2117. Shrink
4. C2093. Simple Repitition
5. A2130. Submission is All You Need

Participated in Codeforces Round 1059 (Div 3), solved problems A and B.

Participated in Leetcode Weekly Contest 471, solved only first problem and achieved 14292 rank.

The solutions to above problems are in my MahendraDani/programming repo.

Deep Dives

1. Containers: Trying to figure out what really are containers? How are they different from VMs and how do they work?

   • I watched the video titled Deepdive Containers - Kernel Sources and nsenter, and it really was an eye-opener. Containers use the host's namespaces and create an isolated environment where we "think" oh it's a container, but in reality it's just another process running on the host with very specific set of permissions.
   • The this talk on Container by the Linux Foundation, explains the foundation and concepts used for building containers.
   • To finish off, I watched this talk, where an container was implemented in Go from scratch in around ~100 lines of code.

2. procfs: I learnt about /proc directory while learning about containers and so I played with it myself.

   • Read through blogs and docs related to procfs, executed a few commands myself in a Docker container and published my notes.

3. Downloaded and set up Inkscape from source, tried to understand both the code and the use of graphical editor.

Reading List

1. Caching - Planetscale blog. Ok. A good introduction to what is caching, conceptually (not just redis-redis-redis!), spatial, geographical and temporal locality in caching. Read my notes.

2. procfs - Read through the following docs and blogs for exploring procfs. Read my notes.

   1. The /proc Filesystem - Linux Docs. Kernel docs specifying the use of each and every file with reference to the kernel's source code.
   2. The /proc directory in Linux. Blog explaining the most commonly used files in the proc directory in simple words. A good intro to the concept.
   3. A journey into the Linux proc filesystem. Another blog with many explanations and screenshots showing output of multiple commands. Good for a hands-on overview of the proc dir.
   4. The proc File system. - Red Hat. Specification of the /proc directory specific to Red Hat Linux distro.
   5. /proc File - IBM. Doc file with clear explanations of proc directory and it's usage in Linux.

3. Rich Dad Poor Dad. Finished the second chapter this week.

Quotes

From Rich Dad Poor Dad:

Rich people acquire assets. The poor and middle class acquire liabilities that they think are assets.

What remains unfinished this week

1. Upsolving Leetcode Weekly Contest 471
2. Upsolving Codeforces Round 1059 (Div 3).
3. Continuing with learning Go and the interpreter.

Footnotes

1. I should also start taking notes of Youtube videos. It happens quite often that I watch a video, and then I find myself deep into a rabbit hole.
2. It's good to plan out a few todos for the entire week with some buffer that gives me freedom to explore and deep-dive into a few topics at the go rather than just saying "it's in my brain".

And here's the first graphic design I created using Inkscape. A smile ball to play with.