Day 3 - Good Sleep, Good Learnings

Tried a lot of stuff today, learned a bunch
Author

Shashank Hosahalli Shivamurthy

Published

June 21, 2025

Day 3 - Good Sleep, Decent Grind

Needed to get some good quality sleep, so woke up with around 7 hours of sleep.

Finished my daily ritual.

Started off with the LC Biweekly Contest — 4 problems in total.

I was able to solve just the first one:

  • 3587. Minimum Adjacent Swaps to Alternate Parity

Really liked the problem. Not trivial at all. I vaguely remembered a similar pattern from an earlier contest, but this one still took a lot of mental energy.
Nice way to activate the brain early in the day.

Watched the India vs England Test match for a bit.

Later, drew the system diagram for a personal side project I’m working on.
Mainly a learning project — no real-world use case, but focused on core concepts:

  • Kafka
  • Producers / Consumers
  • API Gateway
  • Docker Network
  • End-to-End Deployment
  • Microservices

Did a mock DSA interview with a friend, basic BFS stuff.

Struggled with it. Conceptually understood it, but actually writing the code was a whole different story.

It kind of put me in my place. Now I know where I stand.

No excuses, just gotta keep grinding and practicing. Nothing fancy, just consistent effort.

I keep reminding myself:

I need to struggle while learning. That’s when real learning happens.

Looking at solutions too early makes things feel deceptively easy. Need to stop that habit.

Did some basic chores since it’s the weekend: house + room cleaning.

Wanted to deploy my stuff on the Oracle VM I had set up earlier.
It was pretty barebones — had to do everything manually.

So I SSH’d in and went step-by-step:

  • Opened ports I wanted to expose
  • Installed apps
  • Updated system packages

Quick bash for that:

sudo yum update -y

yum (Yellowdog Updater, Modified) is a command-line package manager used on Oracle Linux to install, update, remove, and manage software packages.

Followed this guide to install Docker: https://collabnix.com/how-to-install-docker-on-oracle-linux-a-step-by-step-guide/

For docker-compose, used:

mkdir -p ~/.docker/cli-plugins/
curl -SL https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/v2.27.0/docker-compose-linux-aarch64 -o ~/.docker/cli-plugins/docker-compose
chmod +x ~/.docker/cli-plugins/docker-compose

Wrote the docker-compose.yml for my project and tested it locally, things ran well.

One thing I noticed:
Docker Compose doesn’t natively support waiting for services to be “ready” before starting the next ones. Might explore workarounds.

Also opened the necessary ports via the Cloud Console.

To start Docker engine:

sudo systemctl start docker

Deployed it all on the VM.
Yaaayyy. Lesssgoooo.

Tried setting up a simple frontend on Vercel but wasn’t able to hit the backend API. No idea why — leaving that for tomorrow.

Honestly, I’d say it was a semi-productive day.

But I definitely learned a lot.
Feeling good about how things are shaping up.

Let’s keep building.