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Introduction I used Notion for a couple of years and found it to be one of the best tools for note-taking and building a personal wiki. Why did I stop using it? It wasn’t about the cost—Notion’s freemium plan is perfectly sufficient for personal use. Instead, there were two main issues that drove me away. First, typing math equations in Notion is cumbersome because you have to use a dedicated “Block” for them. Second, it’s difficult to export or migrate your data to other platforms, which, while not entirely Notion’s fault, still concerns me. Most importantly, I realized I should make better use of my Synology NAS. That’s why I decided to explore open-source, self-hosted alternatives. ...

Quarkus is an exciting framework for building modern Java applications, and Quinoa takes it up a notch by streamlining Single Page Application (SPA) development. Together, they enable a seamless workflow for both frontend and backend developers. This guide walks through setting up a Quarkus-based SPA using React as an example, although the process works just as well for other frameworks. Why Quinoa Matters Quinoa elegantly integrates frontend development into Quarkus projects. Here’s why you should care: ...

Google, like many large tech companies, has tightened its grip on profits, making it increasingly difficult for customers to find affordable workarounds. The days of using a VPN to pay for discounted YouTube or Spotify Premium are mostly over. Without a locally issued card, paying for premium services remotely is nearly impossible, with Kazakhstan being the sole exception. While virtual cards like Wise and Revolut can bypass some checks, the process is cumbersome and carries its own risks. ...

A couple of months ago, I had the brilliant idea to upgrade my Mac mini M2 by installing MacOS on an external M.2 SSD. For under 200 bucks, I went from a measly 250GB to a whopping 2TB. I was on cloud nine, reveling in my newfound digital real estate, until the other weekend when the system decided to crash my party by refusing to download upgrades due to a lack of space. Wait, what? ...

Everyone wants a cool terminal and WezTerm is the coolest one in my opinion. It is easy to manage and we can setup a new environment with minutes in association with GNS stow - a symlink manager. WezTerm is easy to configure since it is using lua and very friendly to read and learn. I am dumb at iTerm2 and Tmux, but it only took me 30 mins to start tweaking the config. Everyone wants a cool terminal, and WezTerm is the coolest one in my opinion. It’s easy to manage and we can set up a new environment within minutes using GNU Stow - a symlink manager. ...

My first website was an adventure straight out of 2014, built with Dreamweaver and some basic HTML and CSS. Picture a static site, lovingly crafted to display the research and papers from our lab. The end product was, well, let’s just say not exactly internet-breaking. But hey, it was my first foray into the wild world of web development! Fast forward 10 years, after diving deep into data science, machine learning, and platform engineering, I realized something horrifying: I was still a web development noob. Cue the dramatic music. This simply would not do! So, armed with determination and copious amounts of coffee, I embarked on a quest to master web app development and fill in the gaping holes in my skill set. ...

Imagine you’re walking along a path that has treasure chests and traps. Some chests have gold coins, and some traps take away coins. You want to find the part of the path where you can get the most coins. The key idea: It is a dynamic programming algorithm for finding the maximum contiguous sum subarray in a given array. It is a simple and efficient algorithm that works by maintaining two variables: ...

Preface Facing the Dynamic Programming Challenge Like many others, I initially found Dynamic Programming (DP) on LeetCode daunting and perplexing. However, this challenging journey led to profound insights. My initial misconception was that DP was all about complexity, but I learned it’s fundamentally about simplifying complex problems into manageable segments. Here’s my journey into understanding DP and why it’s a crucial tool in a programmer’s toolkit. Unraveling Dynamic Programming The Essence of DP ...

Overview Recursion is a way of solving a problem by breaking it down into smaller problems of the same type. The smaller problems are then solved recursively, until a base case is reached. The base case is a simple problem that can be solved without recursion. Imagine you have a big box of toy blocks, and each block represents a problem you need to solve. Some blocks are big (complex problems), and some are tiny (simple problems). To solve a big problem, you take apart the big block to find smaller blocks inside, and then, if needed, you take apart those smaller blocks to find even tinier blocks inside them, and so on, until you reach the tiniest blocks that you can easily understand and solve. ...

Overview The union-find algorithm is a data structure and algorithm that maintains a collection of disjoint sets. A disjoint set is a set of elements that are not connected to each other. The union-find algorithm can be used to perform the following operations: Find: Find the set that an element belongs to. Union: Merge two sets together. The union-find algorithm is often used to solve problems that involve graph connectivity. For example, the union-find algorithm can be used to determine whether two nodes in a graph are connected, or to find all of the connected components in a graph. ...