🛤"You can’t be brave if you’ve only ever had wonderful things happen to you" - Mary Tyler Moore

Web links of the week

Enumerate, Don’t Booleanate
I hated Regex so much that I made iHateRegex.io
“CutiePi Shell” is a new, open-source UI for mobile devices
Tech To Watch In 2020

Something that interested me this week

I have been doing a bunch of refactoring on one of my older projects, todometer, lately!
I first released it back in 2017 (aww my newsletter was so young then) when Redux was still all the rage and I knew nothing about Electron. Now that I’m older and wiser (…and less patient with hard-to-maintain code), I’ve been rewriting the whole thing using React Hooks, responsive CSS, and an updated build process. It’s currently in decent shape, and I’m hoping once I get this new version out the door, it’ll be easier to add new versions with more features, and to build for other platforms. My current to-do list (that I’m tracking in the app, of course) is to make it more accessible for non-mouse users and to add keyboard commands for quick jumping around.

Don’t forget, my Kickstarter project is still live! It’s officially fully funded as of today (woo hoo!) and I am so grateful! If you’d like to join in, you still have time and I would love and appreciate your support.

Interview question of the week

Last week I gave you a tricky one, to implement a “hello world” program without repeating any characters in your program except whitespace. If you want to see some non-newsletter answers, this question was inspired by this one on the CodeGolf Stack Exchange. Some of you nailed it, some of you didn’t get it, some were close, and I particularly enjoyed the couple of you who just used the whitespace programming language to solve it! Anyway, overall great job Sophie, Chad, Julio, Ten, Bisuga, Oswaldo, Dimitris, Rubén, and Yuval!

This week’s question courtesy of Louis:
Given that an “even word” is a word in which each character appears an even number of times, write a function that takes in a string and returns the minimum number of letters to be removed to make that string an even word.

Example:

evenWord('aaaa')
> 0

evenWord(‘potato’)

2

Cool things from around the internet

The Sims at 20: how a generation of young people grew up playing God
Behind Amazon’s HQ2 Fiasco
Rama M60-A with SA Ice Caps

Joke

Where do pirates get their hooks?
The second hand store!
(alternate punchline, in a React 16 application hahahaha)

That’s all for now, folks! Have a great week. Be safe, make good choices, and happy February!

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

cassidoo

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