🏸 "You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated." - Maya Angelou

Hellllooo!

Happy 2021! It’s only been a few days but I hope your new year has been off to a good start. Let’s goooo!

Web links of the week

Graph Toy
Great Impractical Ideas in Computer Science: PowerPoint Programming
Publish, ship, and install modern JavaScript for faster applications
Out of the Matrix: Early Days of the Web (1991)

Something that interested me this week

This past week I tried to relax as much as I could before the new year + work started up again. That proved to be difficult, and so I spent a lot of it learning some new things (I played around with Prismic and Bulma), flailing around with Beat Saber, and telling puns.

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 the first occurrence of “2020” in a string. Great job Gabor, Leyan, Mikey, Taylor, Remo, Achraf, Selcuk, Erich, Leslie, Andrea, Ephraim, Roman, Stefi, Charles, Nicolas, Nico, Lucas, Ali, Allen, Clov, Rafael, Dhanush, William, Sreetam, Ivana, Micke, Jeet, Miguel, Ten, Mike, Paulo, Amy, Jonathan, Carlos, Damien, Kyle, and Shasa!

This week’s question (thanks to Tom!):
You’re trying to build an IoT mesh network. Signals can only travel the maximum of 5 units. You’re given coordinates for the switch, the light, and the mesh hubs (which capture and forward signals). Return true if the switch can successfully toggle the light.

Example:

let network = { switch: [0,1], hub: [[2,1], [2,5]], light: [1,6] }
$ canToggle(network)
$ true

If you want a more visual example, here’s a diagram. In this example, canToggle would return false because the red circles don’t connect in the middle, with the blue triangle being the switch, and the green being the light!

Cool things from around the internet

The McTrain: The Rise and Fall of McDonald’s Ambitious Plan to Conquer the Railroads
Humans used to be able to hibernate
The Defiant Power of Rest
NK65v2 with GMK Botanical

Joke

I rely on hotels so much that I’ve become quite Inn-dependent.

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

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

cassidoo

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