Day 19/365: String Manipulation.
Today was useful because string transformation stopped feeling ad hoc. Longest common prefix, compression, and encode/decode all came down to one shared skill: boundary management. I needed to know where agreement ends, where a run ends, or where one serialized item ends so the next one can begin.
That was the key shift. Once the boundary rule was explicit, the code became much easier to trust and much easier to explain.…
