🎆 "You can get excited about the future. The past won't mind." - Hillary DePiano

Happy New Year friends!

Gosh, this year was both the longest and the shortest year ever. Is time real? Who knows. Let’s go out with a bang!

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Web links of the week

How to Support Early Career Developers
Creating A Custom Range Input That Looks Consistent Across All Browsers
if/else in CSS
Spead up sluggish inputs with useDeferredValue

Something that interested me this week

It’s wild to think that the end of the year is already upon us. I certainly didn’t expect to be where I am today, one year ago, but here we are! Looking back, I’m proud of some of the things I was able to get across the finish line:

• MCed several conferences including You Got This, Front-End Test Fest, Jamstack Conf, and Tech Skills Day 2021 (where I got to interview LeVar Burton!)
• Spoke on over 100 podcast episodes and livestreams (almost all of them shared on my Polywork), and co-hosted 3 podcasts (Remotely Interesting, The Stack Overflow Podcast. and CIO Classified)
• Pulled off a couple solid April Fools’ Day pranks, including Netlify Stories, and The Key by Stack Overflow (which ended up turning into an actual product)
• Joined Polywork, Contenda, and Netlify as an advisor
• Gave a couple dozen talks and keynotes like this Developer Day Closing Keynote and this one at Headless Commerce Summit (more of them are listed here)
• Wrote a bunch of blogs and code (both serious and silly), like this post for The ReadME Project, and this morse code emoji demo (with more blog posts here and more code here)
• Last but most certainly not least, I bought and renovated my home! I never want to deal with old carpet or cabinets again.

I said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m so grateful to you for reading this newsletter. I hope you have a very wonderful end to this year, and an enjoyable 2022!

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Interview question of the week

Last week, I had you design a white elephant game! I loved the unique approaches, great job Les, Pedro, and Ten!

This week’s question:
You’re in charge of the fireworks display, and you have a list of fireworks to shoot off. You want to make sure you don’t fire the same colors twice in a row. Given an array of fireworks, return a valid firing order. You decide how you want an impossible solution to work!

Example:

$ orderFireworks(['green','green','green','red','red','blue'])
$ ['green','red','green','red','green','blue']

Cool things from around the internet

SP-111 with GMK Belafonte and Roselios
Unicode character recognition
Where the “Right to Rest” is Guaranteed
You don’t need another challenge

Joke

What kind of dinosaur loves to sleep?
A stega-snore-us.

That’s all for now, folks! Have a great week. Be safe, make good choices, and enjoy the end of the year!

Special thanks to Gabor, Stephen, IceSloth, Emad, Alaska, Josh, Conor, Ezell, Pedro, Karthic, Ximena, Paige, Zev, and Sebastián for supporting my Patreon and this newsletter!

cassidoo

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