Meet Rajesh Gor

Techstructive Weekly #20

Week #20

This week was a slow-moving week, it was a time when we see winters in Mumbai, just for a couple of days and that made me too lazy to wake up early which in turn ruined the entire day. It was that type of week, but good progress.

I wrote a few articles following the advent of code for days 1,2,3,4 and 5, and a couple are in progress.

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Solved the problems for day 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 on live stream.

Implemented a few things and debugged for issues in the existing code, that’s how the usual chore at work, felt good at the end of the week for refreshed implementation and metrics evaluation.

So in a weekly recap:

  • 3 Streams (2 hours+ each)

  • 1 video

  • 5 Articles on approaches for solving AoC problems and implementation in Golang

Quote of the Week

“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.”
— Jim Ryun

Motivation is what gave me the itch to right this newsletter, bu hang on it doesn’t last for a week or two, it is my grit and habit that made me do it till week 20th starting from week 0th.
I started this newsletter to get me out of the writing slump I have been in for quite some months, I have soo many ideas and am not able to find the mindset to write them down. This newsletter has given me the push, the habit of writing and staying to my commitment of writing everything I did in a week and I want to continue as long as I can. It is a habit now for me.

Created

Connect with me on Youtube or on Twitch for live stream solving Advent of Code in Golang problems days 9 till 14 this weekend.

Read

  • Introducing Limbo: A complete rewrite of SQLite in Rust
    This is pretty cool, I was thinking it might be already there, yes definitely, but they are just not re-writing it, they are forking and adding features on top of it which is absolutely wild. Surely there won’t be time gains, but they now have a lot more control over what needs to be changed and included while adding more or even upstreaming from SQLite-core. People might call re-writing a waste of time (especially for such a well-developed and stable tool), but people forget they are making something from scratch gives you a whole different depth of understanding than just forking it. It will pay dividends slowly in the long run, pulling from upstream might be challenging and tedious but since SQLite is rock-solid, there won’t be any breaking changes that might get added to it, so a win-win for Turso in my opinion.

  • Interview gone wrong: Python tidbit
    This was just a small tidbit that the author is trying to make here and I kind of agree, python has syntax sugar and gets too abstracted while doing some dangerous pointer things.

  • A Revolution in how robots learn (40-minute read)
    I read it on a Sunday morning and I was just in awe with the writing and the flow of one example to other. The way the author describes every act of robots learning with the example of his kids is really touching and makes it so human. Worth my time.

  • Writing as a software engineer:

![](https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/157b59b0-a7e4-4f31-8d83-9a2034b2ff4e_354x354.png align=“left”)

The Polymathic Engineer

Writing as as software engineer

Hi Friends…

Read more

11 days ago · 31 likes · 5 comments · Franco Fernando

  • This was one of the articles, that reminded me that the only thing that can improve the craft is by doing it. By producing more, you make mistakes, you know what it is to fail, you then re-approach the problem with different tactic and learn and iterate. No writer is perfect, all are in some range of perfect, it’s just that I am just starting and there are a ton of things to learn and improve on, but they won’t come off thin air, I have to put in the work and produce stuff for it to happen.

  • Advent of Code day 8 after implementing myself, I decided to take a look at others’ solutions:
    https://www.bytesizego.com/blog/aoc-day8-golang
    This
    was an easy problem from the implementation perspective I did it in a few minutes, to be honest, but understanding it was tough, so I left the explaining to others. This post shows courage and willingness to go in the wild, show your approach and do it skillfully, truly an inspiration to write and complete Blogvent (I am running a week behind already :))

  • Noticing the nice things:
    This was such a nice post, having kids around is nice. I might be too early to say this, but I find it wholesome and cute. Also, she is is running blogvent, cheer her up for maintaining 12 day streak, 13 more to go!

Watched

  • The Primeagen and Teej Devries interview with Ginger Bill, the creator of Odin language, with some hot-takes and opinions about his philosophy of software development, Language Server Protocols and auto-completions, Package managers, simplicity, and more of his experiences.

  • Neovim made me a better software developer
    This is a great talk by a Neovim contributor and documentation reader TJ,, if you use Neovim/Vim and don’t know TJ, shame on you! He explains what are the factors that contribute to a better software developer, all the points are so well thought out and backed up by facts. So, highly recommend checking that out.

  • Advent of Code: Behind the Scenes by creator Eric Wastl
    Solving a problem for Advent of Code won’t be the same anymore after watching this video, the amount of work someone has to do and that appreciation is now ebbed into my mind while reading any problem in AoC. This talk shows how low were his expectations when he initially launched AoC in 2025, from 70 users to millions of users, which is such a great achievement for a side project. Just hard work and the result of that.

Learnt

  • Swizzling operation on arrays

    Here’s something I read from Thorsten Ball’s tweet or post on Bluesky:

    TIL Odin supports swizzling, a concept I only learned this year about when writing shaders for the first time in my life
    https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/
    

    I got interested in the way it was documented, so I decided to take a look and went on a rabbit hole of searching for what it meant, I knew from the examples what it was but still wanted to understand from the developer’s perspective why and where It could be used.
    Here is what I read about it more, there is no beginner-level or nice explanation of swizzling for programmers. I will surely write about it.
    It’s basically like a shortcut hack for working with arrays or we can denote them as a matrix to perform operations on them efficiently.

  • Memoization for caching problems where things are too repetitive
    While solving the advent of code problem day 11, this concept could be handy as it helps to store the already computed values in a map or a cache or data store, whatever you wanna call it at your scale. However, the essence is to store the computed value for the later stage, where there are clear-cut rules or defined behavior of the computation required to do certain things.
    In the context of this problem, we have to check how many stones will be there at the end of 25 blinks, basically at each blink, there are certain rules like if there is a stone numbered 0, it changes to 1, there is one more rule and you can check the whole question here. It can be solved using a map where we know a stone number can be split into n number of stones, so we use that when we encounter that number in the future and don’t re-compute it again.

  • Use structs instead of a list of integers for coordinates, please

    I am solving advent of code problems in golang, and gosh I have wasted so much time using a slice of integers instead of creating structs, the code shouts to use it, but reluctant elitist me refrained from doing it and went with the flow and ended up messing up gazillions of time index of x with y and yes it was a skill issue.
    I WILL USE THE STRUCT type point struct {x int; y int} INSTEAD OF THIS DAMN THING []int{} .

  • df to_json is a handy way to dump a data frame when looking for something very minute or finding some pattern

    I discovered that df.to_json is a function available to dump out a data frame to a JSON file which is quite nice and handy. I did use it to export a data frame in a notebook to a file while I was debugging a few things, and this function came in like a savior in the sea of lots of data.

  • Learnt and Learned are both valid achsually
    I use the title of this section as LEARNT but LEARNED is fine as well, and Grammarly makes both incorrect, he wants it to be Learn it is done, I have learned it this week, I am not learning it now, so please stop yelling at me about that. Then in their article, they say both are valid, what a sweet cohesion!

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Thank you for reading, let’s catch up in the next week.

Happy Coding :)

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