Feature #3: Find Story ID
Explore how to implement an optimized search for story IDs in an array that organizes watched and unwatched stories. Learn to apply a modified binary search technique by identifying the sorted half of the array, improving the efficiency of finding stories in real-time Facebook and Instagram data processing.
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Description
This feature will allow us to watch or re-watch stories on Instagram that are uploaded through Facebook. Every story uploaded by a user on Facebook gets assigned a unique incrementing id. On Instagram, a user can only watch one story at a time. These stories will be accessed from Facebook in ascending id order. When a story is watched, the story array rotates to accommodate unwatched stories at the start and watched stories at the end. Since stories are fetched from Facebook, so whenever a user wants to rewatch a story on Instagram, our system has to search for its id in the Facebook story array.
Observe this behavior in the illustration below:
We’ll have an array containing the story id’s. Some of the stories ...