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Akshay Kumar

A potpourri of ideas



End of 2025

Posted: December 29, 2025 #life
As 2025 comes to a close, it’s time to look back at the year that was. I spent a greater than average amount of time in work, but that’s not to say I didn’t have fun along the way. Workout wise, I had a good start in first half of the year. But, it fizzled rapidly towards the end of the year. Ca...

Resources for system design interview preparation

Posted: June 9, 2024 #system-design
I was recently looking at prep material for system design interviews. Enumerating the ones I found useful: System Design primer - A condensed introduction to various topics relevant to System Design. This could be your baby steps for system design interview prep. The repo also has resources f...

Various flavors of binary search

Posted: June 8, 2024 #leetcode #algorithms
I was recently griding leetcode. Here, I take a look at binary search implementation. While the overall algorithm is simple, getting its implementation correct can be tricky - there are multiple edge cases to keep track of. We will start with a simple standard binary search problem and iterativel...

Unique games conjecture

Posted: May 13, 2022 #theory
This post was published way back in 2015 when this was in news. Mirroring it here from my old page. Very recently, Subhash Khot won the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize, considered one of the top honours in the field of mathematics, for his contribution to computational complexity theory. The conjecture ha...

Transactions in distributed databases

Posted: September 29, 2021 #database #distributed
As a follow up to this post on replication, I’ll discuss transactions in distributed databases. A transaction is a group of reads and writes lumped together into a logical unit. Our aim is the entire should transaction should succeed. If it fails, we rollback the whole transaction and let client...
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