👓 "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." - Will Durant

Hey friends!

We made it! 2020 is over! This is our last issue of the year and I don't know about you, but I am GLAD to be putting this one behind us. Let's go!

Web links of the week

How did JavaScript's console.log get its name?
How to increase CSS-in-JS performance by 175x
2020 Ipsum
Font Family Reunion

Something that interested me this week

Phew, what a year it's been! I'm sure I'm not alone in the fact that I did not expect so many plans to change. At the beginning of the year I traveled a bunch, to Austria for AgentConf, to Hawaii for JSConf Hawaii, to France for Codin' Night, to Ireland for SISTEM, and a whole lot more for my job at React Training. Plus, I launched my first ever Kickstarter project! And then... the pandemic hit. The travel and conferences I had booked for the rest of the year were all canceled suddenly, as they were for so many others. My whole team including myself got laid off, and I had no idea what would happen next.

I am so grateful that I stayed healthy, and was able to get a gig in the spring and take on some projects. I started on the team at Netlify at the end of April, and the team is absolutely wonderful. I released three online courses on my own, Building Reusable React, React Interview Questions, and Building a Resume Website with HTML and CSS, and one at work called Next.js from the Ground Up. I started actively streaming at cassidoo.live, and more consistently writing blog posts both on the Netlify blog and on dev.to. I participated virtually in a bunch of events as an MC and speaker like Women of React, Reactathon, and Next.js Conf, and dozens of others. I also started as the co-host of the podcast CIO Confidential, and increased the frequency of the Stack Overflow Newsletter to every week!

In non-tech news, I also made an unexpected move this year from Seattle to Chicago. I'm originally from here, and I'm so excited to be closer to family that I can visit more regularly once the pandemic is over. This year was not great, but I'm very hopeful for 2021!

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 build stories into an app! Great job Abe, Ephraim, Dimitris, Leslie, David, Achraf, Vanessa, Jonathan, and Ten!

This week's question:
You're given a string of characters that are only 2s and 0s. Return the index of the first occurrence of "2020" without using the indexOf (or similar) function, and -1 if it's not found in the string.

Example:

$ find2020('2220000202220020200')
$ 14

I also want to give a shout-out to Ten, who solved the interview question EVERY WEEK this year!! He wrote about it back in February, and even did some study groups around them. Major kudos to your dedication, Ten!

Cool things from around the internet

To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language
NP PBT on the Frosted Acrylic Tofu
Knifemaking - The Witches Finger
"Tasting Qualities": What Tea Tells Us

Joke

What's made of leather and sounds like a sneeze?
A shoe!

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

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

cassidoo

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