Day 19 - Back to Routine and Day 1 of Kafka

Early start, workout, Leetcode grind, and diving into Kafka
Author

Shashank Hosahalli Shivamurthy

Published

July 7, 2025

Day 19 - Back to Routine and Day 1 of Kafka

Woke up early today, right before my alarm rang.

But seriously, I need to stop looking at my phone first thing in the morning.
Spent 15 to 20 minutes just scrolling instead of getting up. Waste of time. Gotta fix that.


Decided to start doing some physical activity daily:

  • ✅ 40 pushups (10 × 4)
  • ✅ 15 minutes of core workout
  • ✅ 30-minute morning walk
    • 2.75 km, 5k steps
    • Felt good to catch some early sun ☀️

Came home, showered, made my coffee, and got started.


Leetcode Practice

121. Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock

  • Done this before, so was easy
  • Just use two pointers
  • Key part is knowing when to move the left pointer

48. Rotate Image

  • Fun one — a little mathy
  • Brute force was simple
  • In-place rotation was the tricky part
  • Trick: Transpose the matrix → then reverse each row

53. Maximum Subarray

  • Brute force: O(n²) with two loops
  • Optimal: Kadane’s Algorithm

Key idea:
Track a running sum. If it becomes negative, reset to 0.
Negative values don’t help increase the total — they just pull it down.

Really liked the intuition behind it.


Kafka Learning - Day 1

Started learning Apache Kafka in depth.

Today was just Day 1, but I’ve documented everything I learned.
Wrote it to help myself quickly revise later.

Feel free to give it a read here if you’re curious, it’s pretty easy to just glance through.


Later in the evening, tailored my resume to a few specific roles I’m really interested in.
Applied to those. Fingers crossed 🤞


Wrapped up with dinner and went to sleep.

Let’s run it back tomorrow.

Slowly, but surely.