⏩ "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." - Søren Kierkegaard

Hello friends!

Phew, I can't believe this past week was... only a week. Let's surf.

Web links of the week

AnimXYZ
JavaScript Questions
Omatsuri: Open source browser tools for everyday use
Making Persistent Build Folders in Netlify

Something that interested me this week

Not gonna lie, this week was really overwhelming. Between Slack and Notion and Twitch going down, and the attempted coup at the US Capitol... I admit it did not feel like a productive first week of 2021.

In happier news, I discovered Smithsonian Open Access, and it's a really wonderful source of art and content!

Sponsor

This week's sponsor is Flatfile!

Think of the last time you imported a spreadsheet. Did it work the first time?

Nearly everyone has dealt with formatting messy CSVs or Excel files prior to importing. It's a huge pain!

Worse yet, countless engineers are tasked with building a data parser from scratch, importer, mapping, validation, UI, and all! As enticing as it is to build another data importer compared to core product features, Flatfile has finally made a solution.

Flatfile Portal is the elegant import button, offering an intuitive data import experience. Portal integrates with virtually any application and in minutes can intelligently ingest, validate, and transform incoming spreadsheet data so that it's clean, and ready to use in your backend.

Interested in trying out the elegant import button? Visit get.flatfile.io/cassidoo!

Interview question of the week

Last week, I had you return true if an IoT mesh network worked. Great job Dhanush, Leyan, Elliot, David, Leslie, Yao, Vanessa, Rafael, Gustavo, Artem, Ivana, Carlos, Ten, and Jonathan!

This week's question:
Given a n x m binary matrix filled with 0s and 1s, find the largest rectangle containing only 1s and return its area.

Example:

$ matrix =
  [
  ["1","0","1","0","0"],
  ["1","0","1","1","1"],
  ["1","1","0","1","1"],
  ["1","0","0","1","0"]
  ]
$ largestRect(matrix)
$ 4

Cool things from around the internet

An Engineering Argument for Basic Income
Bored People Quit
How One Modder Discovered Nintendo's Most Advanced Miis Hiding in Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Conundrum keyboard with DSS Tecla

Joke

What do you say when a dinosaur farts?
That was a blast from the past!

That's all for now, folks! Have a great week. Be safe, make good choices, and don't let the news get you down.

Special thanks to Gabor, Stephen, Shell, and IceSloth for supporting my Patreon and this newsletter!

cassidoo

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