Day 2: Neo4j and LeetCode

Visakh Vijayan
2 min readMay 14, 2022

Previous: Day 1: Blockchain and Smart contracts

I woke up with an idea to make a family tree. I had a huge list of relatives which seemed ever-growing. The idea was to maintain an excel since I was a fan of documenting stuff but then I felt why not make a generalized software which would allow people to document theirs as well. I found a really good website that did it called Ancestry but somehow the mind was inclined towards making one of my own.

I started googling and soon realized that our conventional databases are not made to maintain such a graphical structure of data. And hence I landed upon graph databases. It seemed perfect. You have the concept of nodes and relationships which was all that I was looking for.

Further googling landed me on Neo4j which was the only popular graph database that had a community and proper documentation. I started off with a very nice video by LalithAcademy which helped me learn the basics of setting up Neo4j, how to install and use the browser client and how to query it using the Cypher language. What a cool name.

I learned about multiple ways to use the MATCH query. The best part was how it gave a pictorial representation of the data queried. I finally wrapped when it started getting to me when the author started aggregations. Leaving it to the next day.

Then shifted to Algorithms as that is the only thing that matters while appearing for interviews. If you don’t clear this then there is no way you can prove how good you are at other technologies. After going through a lot of articles and trying to start from scratch on learning the basics of data structures, I realized how boring it is to learn the theory of DS. Hence I opened LeetCode and started solving problems. This is how I look on LeetCode. The rank literally gave me a heart attack. That is how far I have to travel. Solved questions on —

  1. https://leetcode.com/problems/two-sum/
  2. https://leetcode.com/problems/add-two-numbers/

The rewards
To bring joy back in life watched — The House of Gucci. Realized that making money vs making a brand are two different things. Anyone can make money. There is a hell lot of money involved in IT and no limit on how much you can make if you are a freelance developer but a brand persists across generations. Have to give serious thought to how to slowly navigate into a business soon. For now, it’s making unlimited money.

Next: Day 3: LeetCode, JS

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Visakh Vijayan

Techie from Kerala, India. Days are for coding, nights for weaving tales of tech, travel, and finance. Join me in exploring this multifaceted journey