Hey friends!

Another week is here and... can you believe it's already the last week of March?? Let's boogie.

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Web links of the week

Going beyond pixels and (r)ems in CSS - Absolute length units
Stuck in the Middle with You: An intro to Middleware
How to Create Interactive Animations Using React Spring
Type system of the React compiler

Something that interested me this week

This week I shipped my first (!) paid app, W-9 Crafter! I first "pitched" this app in Discord way back in 2021 when I was complaining about how I have to make W-9s for all of my various contracting clients, with the form information always being the same except for the date. W-9 Crafter is a glorified button that solves that problem!

It was really fun building this and putting it all together, and I livestreamed shipping it out! I blogged about it, made a Product Hunt listing, a small demo video, and allll the social posts (Twitter, LinkedIn, etc). It was a really cool learning experience shipping this. It wasn't a perfect launch, but I am super motivated now to try it again. The fact that folks have bought something I coded initially just for myself is SO exciting!

If you wanna nab W-9 Crafter for yourself, you can get it here (and be sure to use coupon RWCNEWZ when you do for a nice chunk o' change off the top)!

Also, in case you missed it, I will be speaking at THE MERGE in Berlin on June 13 & 14! There are some really awesome events and speakers and food lined up. The first 50 people to use my discount Cassidoo50 get 50% off. See you there!!

Sponsor

Trieve is a YC company offering source-available Rusty 🦀 infrastructure for building full-text + semantic search 🔍 and RAG ✨ into your applications. Give their GitHub a star ⭐!

Try A/B testing them against Algolia using their demo for the YC Company Directory at yc.trieve.ai. The results might shock you 👀.

If you want to use it yourself, they offer 1k indexed documents for free with unlimited queries on their hosted cloud at dashboard.trieve.ai. Happy hacking 🍻!

Interview question of the week

Last week, I had you find hills and valleys in an array! Y'all did great Altamish, Alexandra, Plamedi, Krzysztof, Arban, Jonnie, Amine, Dawood, Neil, Nathael, Saad, Sami, Ryan, Kyle, Avanika, and Ten!

This week's question:
Given a 2D array of 0s and 1s, where 0 represents water and 1 represents land, return the size of the largest "island" in the water. Diagonal connections don't count!

Example:

let map = [
[0,1,1,1,0,0,0,1,1],
[0,1,1,1,0,1,0,0,0],
[0,1,0,0,0,0,0,1,0],
[0,0,1,1,0,1,1,1,0],
]

> largestIsland(map)
> 7

(you can submit your answers by replying to this email with a link to your solution, or share on LinkedIn, Twitter, Mastodon, or Bluesky)

Cool things from around the internet

AreTheyMadAtMe.com
The Carpenters - Yesterday Once More - Classical Guitar
“She’s Bouncing the Ball!” On the Uncanny Way Octopuses Play
Bakeneko keyboard with GMK Taiga

Joke

What do you call a fancy fish?
Sofishticated!

That's all for now, folks! Have a great week. Be safe, make good choices, and shower!

Special thanks to IceSloth, Ezell, Sebastián, Ben, and Kinetic Labs for supporting my Patreon and this newsletter!

cassidoo

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