Interacting with people with similar goals like ourselves is a fruitful experience because it is easy to connect with others and we get to learn a lot from those interactions. A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to join the ScholarX mentoring program as a mentee where I met many young adults with similar aspirations and career goals. Five of us had a very fun yet meaningful conversation with our mentor.

Before diving into my experiences, let me give a brief background.

What is ScholarX?

Parallel programming has become an inevitable skill that all programmers should master. Threads running in parallel typically use shared resources for several reasons such as communication and coordination. Thread synchronization is a technique to avoid race conditions when these shared resources are manipulated concurrently by multiple threads. In this article, we will compare the two approaches to achieve thread synchronization: Lock-based vs Lock-free thread synchronization.

Lock-based Synchronization

The lock-based synchronization is a historically popular way to avoid race conditions. The idea is simple. The segments of code where shared resources are accessed are identified as critical sections. A critical section is protected…

In the first three articles of the sorting algorithms series, we discussed selection sort, insertion sort, and bubble sort. We also did theoretical performance analysis using amortized time complexities. The following table summarizes their time complexities.

In the first two articles of the sorting algorithms series, we looked at Selection Sort and Insertion Sort. Bubble sort is another simple sorting algorithm that is easy to understand and implement. The idea is to compare the adjacent elements and swap them if they are in incorrect order. Let’s use an example to understand how bubble sort works.

Suppose the array to be sorted is (8, 4, 3, 9, 1), the following diagram illustrates how bubble sort performs several iterations until the array is completely sorted.

In the previous article, we looked at selection sort. Insertion sort is a simple sorting algorithm that is very similar to selection sort. Given an array of elements to be sorted, insertion sort works as follows:

• Divide the array into two subarrays: sorted and unsorted subarray (similar to that of selection sort)
• In each iteration, remove the first element from the unsorted subarray and insert it in the proper position (depending on whether to be sorted in ascending or descending order) in the sorted subarray.
• Iterate until the last element of the unsorted array is removed

Let us look at…

Selection sort is one of the basic sorting algorithms which is easy to understand and implement. The idea is simple: given an array of elements to be sorted,

• Divide the array into two subarrays: sorted and unsorted subarrays
• In each iteration, find the maximum/minimum element in the unsorted subarray and swap it with the first element of the unsorted subarray. After swapping, the first element of the unsorted subarray will be appended to the sorted subarray. Swapping the minimum value will sort the elements in ascending order while swapping the maximum value will sort the elements in descending order.
• Continue…

All of us learned how to multiply two numbers when we were kids. In case we have forgotten (😄), let’s look at how to multiply two numbers 19 and 95.

For a new user, the Linux environment is not as user-friendly as Windows. It would take some time to become familiar with the terminal and terminal commands. I remember myself struggling to even traverse through the directories and doing a google search for everything.

Here is a list of some basic Linux commands that would be useful for beginners.

1. FILE HANDLING

A. To Create a File

touch file_name

For example, if we want to create a text file named mytext, then: touch mytext.txt

B. To Edit a File

nano file_name

After editing the file, use ctrl + x to save the changes…