Heeeellllooooo friends!

Hope you're having a good week. Mine was busy, which is better than boring. Let's get scootin.
 

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Web links of the week

How to create a Neural Network in JavaScript in only 30 lines of code
The What and Why of Redux
Typical JavaScript interview exercises (explained)
How My 10-Year-Old Learned Javascript
 

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Something that interested me this week

This week, I wrote a tweet that got pretty popular (before tell me how to quit vim: I know how to quit vim)!
As my phone started to rapidly die from the notifications, I started looking into how to find out what made the tweet so popular (besides my amazing sense of humor).

First of all, I found out that Twitter Analytics is free and pretty easy, which was a pleasant surprise.  It seems more geared towards businesses, but it's fun to see the number of impressions you make over time (my tweet pushed me to over a million for the past month!) and the amount of engagement around each tweet.  I also learned, fun fact, you're limited to making 1,000 tweets per day (which is a LOT of tweeting, so I doubt that'd be an issue for anyone).  Anyway, after hunting around for tools, I struggled to find out which retweets pushed it out to the most people.  Twitonomy was helpful, but only showed the most recent 100 retweeters on their free plan.  TweetStats was also interesting, but mostly just showed graphs of who you reply to most often (that's what I found most tools to do).  In the end, just from scrolling on the tweet itself, I did see that Tim Pope, SwiftOnSecurity, Stack Overflow, and the GIMP retweeted it, but that's probably as far as I'll get (without paying for a business tool, which really, I don't need).  Anyway.  On with the show!
 

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Interview question of the week

Write a function that takes in an integer n that prints a ”spiral” of n × n numbers, using constant space (no arrays allowed).

For example, here’s what the spiral looks like for n = 10:

99   98   97   96   95   94   93   92   91   90
64   63   62   61   60   59   58   57   56   89
65   36   35   34   33   32   31   30   55   88
66   37   16   15   14   13   12   29   54   87
67   38   17    4    3    2   11   28   53   86
68   39   18    5    0    1   10   27   52   85
69   40   19    6    7    8    9   26   51   84
70   41   20   21   22   23   24   25   50   83
71   42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   82
72   73   74   75   76   77   78   79   80   81

 

Good morning, afternoon, or evening, whenever and wherever you are!

It was a tough week in the world. I hope you're taking care of yourself and others. Let's boogie.
 

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Web links of the week

10 guidelines to improve your web accessibility
Hot and Sticky: The Process
Web fonts: when you need them, when you don’t
Web Maker: A blazing fast & offline web playground in your browser
Using ES2017 Async Functions​
 

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Something that interested me this week

This week was such a tough one with the horrifying events in Charlottesville and Barcelona.  I rewrote this section of the newsletter at least 9 times trying to come up with the right words to say (I upped the count in this sentence every time). Racism is bad. Nazis are bad. Terrorism is bad. Call it out and reject it when you see it, or see people sympathizing with it. Be strong and care for one another.

Unrelated, when I was looking for music videos to code to this week, I discovered this one, and thought you might enjoy it.
 

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Interview question of the week

Change or add only one character in the following snippet so that the program prints * exactly 20 times. There are at least 3 solutions to this problem.

    int main()
    {
         int i, n = 20;
         for (i = 0; i < n; i--)
             printf("*");
         getchar();
         return 0;
    }​

 

Howdy partners!

Welcome back. I hope this upcoming weekend is a productive one for you. Or, if you need a break, do that. Play some Zelda. Eat some ice cream. Enjoy the sun. Code indoors. Follow your dreams.   veryone should have the opportunity to be technical if they want to. Everyone can contribute technically, and maybe even surprise you with some ideas you hadn't heard before. Because the industry is so biased at times, events and opportunities targeting minority groups in the field are made so that people can have a community and a chance that they might not otherwise have. I encourage you to accept this, and welcome people into this wacky field of ours. Don't question why I didn't also direct the previous paragraph at you, too. If someone tells you a negative experience they've had that is likely due to the way they look, don't shut it down and invalidate by saying, "oh they were just a jerk" or something. Don't get defensive. Listen, look out for behavior like that, and help shut that behavior down. And thank you in advance. That's a lot of words. Let's get back to our regularly scheduled jazz.       Why can't a nose be 12 inches long? Because then it would be a foot.  

Hello hello helllllllooooo!

I hope you are all having an absolutely delightful weekend. And if you aren't, I hope this helps that, even a little bit. Let's get smashing!           I burned my Hawaiian pizza today. Should've cooked it on aloha temperature.   There you have it. Have a great week everyone, be safe, make good choices, and watch out for bears.

Hello friends!

Welcome back. Hope you all had a lovely week and are ready for a lovely weekend. And if you didn't, I hope it gets better.

Let's do the tech tango and dance ourselves on down to web world!
 

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Web links of the week

Generating images in JavaScript without the Canvas API
Bundle Buddy: A tool to identify bundle duplication
A beginner’s guide to making Progressive Web Apps​
React Pattern: Extract Child Components to Avoid Binding
 

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Something that interested me this week

Let's be real, the thing that interested me the most this week was an AMAZING slice of key lime pie that I got at the grocery store. It's probably the best key lime pie I've ever had. It's from a really small company called Cyrus O'Leary's Pies (their website uses both Flash and MapQuest... maybe I can offer to fix their website in exchange for pies). I love pie. I love that Pi day is a day where you can eat pie AND celebrate math. I'm thinking that I'll probably have just a bunch of pies at my wedding instead of a wedding cake.

Anyway. That's what interested be this week. Only hard-hitting content here, people!
 

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Interview question of the week

Write a function that will take in a number from the Fibonacci sequence, and prints a golden spiral based on that number.

For example:

> spiral(5)
 |¯¯¯¯¯
 | ¯|
 |__|

Happy (end of) weekend everyone!  Hope this next one is smooth sailing.

Until we get back to work, let's boogie.   Do you have a blog post or article you want in next week's newsletter? Just reply to this email with it and I'll check it out! :)   This week I started learning about 3D printing (my office has a free 3D printer for us to use), and it was like drinking from the fire hose.  There was SO MUCH to learn! So firstly, you have to give the machine a 3D model to print, obviously.  There's out there with free models, or you can make your own.  I tried my hand at making my own with (which is free, which I obviously prefer, but still a little limited in its options) and stuck it in the printer. But, the first attempt failed.  There's a LOT you have to do to set up a 3D printer properly (shout out to companies like that take out that part of the process).  You have to handle the actual size of the print, the printing height of each layer of plastic, the supports that are also printed for your model (to be cut off later), the shape of said supports, the amount of heat for said supports (if they're too hot when you print them, then they're stuck to your model and hard to take off... ran into that problem too), the printing speed, the types of printing plastic... and moooore.  Thank goodness some of my coworkers know their stuff, so I've got a lot to learn from them and with some trial and error.  That being said, if you have access to a 3D printer, I definitely recommend trying it out!  It's fun being able to solve problems and improve situations you have with a little bit of creativity and math.  Or just make silly things, like this that I printed. :)   A reader for the interview question last week, and it looks awesome! Great work Joey! Note: Try to not use a loop in this one!     A pregnant woman is hit by a car. She's sent into a coma for 1 year. She wakes up, no longer pregnant, and yells, "Doctor! Doctor! Where is my baby?!" The doctor replies, "Calm down, your babies are fine. You had twins! A girl and a boy. We gave them to your brother to watch while you were in the hospital." She says, "My brother? No! That guy is a moron! Why would you do that?" "I am sorry ma'am, we had no choice. There was nobody else. He also took the liberty of naming them." "Oh no," she says, "What did he name my daughter?" "He named her Denise," says the doctor. "Oh, well that's not so bad. What did he name my son?" "He named him Denephew."   There ya have it folks, hope you have a delightful week ahead of you. Be safe, make good choices, and follow your dreams.

Hi friends <3

I've got some fun things to share with you this week. And for those wondering, . Let's go!     This week I flew to visit family, and it got me to really think about how airlines work.  A lot has to go into it, from scheduling, to ticket sales (pricing and the actual sales), to managing flight attendants and cleanup crews and pilots, to the ability to fly out of certain airports... the more I thought about it the more impressed I was with the (somewhat) smooth process that we take advantage of and don't really notice unless something goes wrong.  I looked up airlines on , as well as .  I also read the amazing book to get some insight, which if you haven't read it, it's so impressive.  Anyway.  Something something ?     Extra credit: build it.     A 13 year old weasel walks into a bar and approaches the counter. The bartender immediately notices the underage weasel. “Sir, you look extremely young. I can’t serve you even a single beer.” “Oh c’mon. You can’t just slide me one?” “Can’t and will not serve to anyone under age.” “Fine. Well what other things do you have?” “Well for non-alcoholics I have tap water and bottled water, I have coffee, and I have pop. Which would you like?” “Pop.” Goes the weasel.   For all you Americans out there, have a very happy 4th of July. For everyone else, hope you enjoy that day too. Be safe, make good choices, and eat some fruit, it's good for you.

Gooooooooood day to you!

After a long week, it's time for another rendezdous with cassidoo.  Let's get tootin.
 

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Web links of the week

I miss React and so pretty much all of these are React this time around. Enjoy!

Debate: VueJS vs. ReactJS​
How Pure CSS Images Helped Me Understand React Components
Maddy, a functional object operations library
How to use Webpack’s new “magic comment” feature with React Universal Component + SSR
How to Make a Simple Twitter Clone with React Native​
 

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Something that interested me this week

This week was a really busy week for me. Lots of deadlines, lots of stuff to do in general. Two people this week asked me, "you seem busy, do you love your job?"

Reflecting on this, I am happy. I love being busy and getting to work on a bunch of different projects (as stressful as it can be sometimes) in and outside of work. And because I do a lot of client work, I sometimes love my job. 😉

I think what's more important though than loving your job is the ability a job gives you to love and do the things (people, activities, hobbies, projects) you want to love and do.  What I love about my job is that I have the work/life balance and the opportunity to do side projects, practice instruments, play games, and just enjoy my life outside of work (which sounds like common sense, but it's not something I did before this current company).  I definitely acknowledge that I am privileged in this regard and not everyone gets the option to have this freedom of choice.
That being said, if anyone out there runs a tech company or has the ability to give employees more time to themselves, I can honestly say that I think I am more productive at work now because I am not working all the time. Consider promoting that to your teams!

As a related note, big congratulations to my company, L4 Digital, on being named in the top 10 of Washington's 100 best companies to work for. They deserve it!
 

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Interview question of the week

Write a function that takes in a string and reverses all the vowels in the string.

Example:

> reverseVowels("I love burritos")
> "o livu berrotIs"

 

HELLO FRIENDS!

Hope your weekend was splendid. This is a little later than usual because, well... let's be real, I started playing and it consumed my entire weekend and I regret nothing.  Anyway.  Let's go.     Two major media things made my week amazing. The first was . I finally got to see the movie, and I admit I teared up multiple times. Not out of sadness, but out of this odd sense of... awe. For the first time in a LONG time, I was getting goosebumps and this feeling of, "I want to be a part of that." I felt like I was a kid watching what I wanted to be when I grew up. And that feeling was overwhelming, because girls today have such amazing movies (WW, Hidden Figures, even Moana) that they can relate to and be empowered by, and this will inspire a whole new generation of women in the future. And of course, the feeling isn't limited to women. It's just one of very few women-centric movies in the genre that did such an amazing job, and I loved the movie. Highly recommend it if you haven't seen it (whether you're a woman or not). The second thing was . So, going into it, I knew that Zelda games are amazing, and that this one is very "open world" (like Minecraft or something). I had no idea what was in store for me. This game has an element of polished freedom that I genuinely think . It's open, and doesn't have a very linear timeline, and yet you still have quests and objectives you can complete (or not). It's limiting in all the right ways, and freeing in the best ways possible. My giddiest moment was when a bunch of monsters were chasing me, and I realized that I was only chased because I was on the same path as them, so I just jumped off the cliff next to the road and climbed around the mountain. It's so flawlessly executed that you feel a total immersion as you explore the way you want to, not the way the game guides you. 10/10, would also recommend.   Note: Be sure that your Card class includes suits AND numbers!     I burned 2000 calories today. That's the last time I leave cookies in the oven while I nap.   Alright fam, it's been real. Be safe this week, make good choices, and eat some cookies.

Hola familia!

Hope you had a great week, and you're excited for this next one. And if you didn't, I hope the joke today helps. Until then, let's get tootin. 
 

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Web links of the week

A Unified Styling Language
Superhero.js
The largest Git repo on the planet
The Power of CSS
chromatism
Free JavaScript Game Dev Course
 

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Something that interested me this week

This week I started working on some Roku development, which has been quite the trip so far. Roku uses a language called BrightScript exclusively for its apps.  At first I wasn't a fan I admit (I kept looking up, "why is BrightScript a thing" frustratedly, and found a couple Quora answers that somewhat answered that), but once you get the hang of it, the language is pretty straightforward and is really built for Roku, so there aren't many workarounds you have to deal with to get a well-functioning app going.  If you have some content you want to show off on Roku, it's an interesting platform and I recommend checking it out purely because it's kind of weird (which makes it kind of cool).
 

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Interview question of the week

Write a function where given a pattern string like "ABCCA" and an input string like "redyellowbluebluered", return true if and only if there's a one to one mapping of letters in the pattern to substrings of the input.

> patternMatch('ABA', 'keyboardkey')
true
> patternMatch('AA', 'fishyfish')
false

 

Helllllloooooo!

Happy Memorial Day to those in the USA, and for everyone else: Happy Monday!  Let's get jiggy with it.
 

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Web links of the week

Data-driven Vue.js
oodo: Open source apps to grow your business
What's new in Create React App
npm 5.0 released
Introducing Twilio Functions
 

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Something that interested me this week

This week, as some of you might know, I spoke at Twilio SIGNAL!  I talked about how quick and easy Vue.js is and then live-coded up a NASA search engine Vue.js app.  The JSON parsing broke on stage (the joys of live-coding), but about a minute after going off I found the issue and pushed it online for ~the world~ to see.  Once done with my talk, the conference was really interesting and fun.  Twilio released a bunch of new products and really emphasized promoting diversity and inclusion in tech, and launched Hatch, an engineering apprenticeship program.  They had a big party at the end called $BASH that was full of games, puzzles, music, and lots of food.  After literally running to play and win games all night, I had enough points to win a Nintendo Switch, so I personally had a blast. ;)
 

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Interview question of the week

Given a list of menu items and their prices, and the amount in your wallet, return all combinations of items that you can buy.

Example:

menu = { 'taco' : 1, 'burger' : 2, 'shawarma' : 3 }
wallet = 3
> combo(menu, wallet)
['taco', 'taco', 'taco']
['taco', 'burger']
['shawarma']

 

It's time to chow down. On some knowledge. And humor.

Hey friends!

Welcome back. You made it through another week. Congratulations.

Last time I got several complaints from a large number of you is that I didn't include a jokes section. So I'll have two this time to make up for it. Here we go.

 

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Web links of the week

Front-End Developer Handbook 2017
Setting up Gulp and Sass
JavaScript Basics: The Execution Context and the Lexical Environment
WebGL Tunnel Animation
11 ways to invoke a JavaScript function
Popper.JS: A Popover/Tooltip Library
 

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Something that interested me this week

I ate a lot of cereal this week and started to wonder about how we, as a society, got to eating breakfast cereal. So I looked up the history of it, which was interesting. All of the articles and information on the subject mostly touch on how it was made, and who were the people making it.
I'm curious about what consumers initially thought of it when it came out. Because it was designed to be "ready to eat", it reminded me of how something like Soylent is being marketed right now. Some of the first machines that made cereal were marketed as the "8th Wonder of the World" and said it was the "food of the future". Which, if you look up "Soylent food of the future" right now, you'll find dozens of articles saying just that.
Today, people seem to either love or hate Soylent (and the people who drink it). I wonder if it was similar when breakfast cereal started to become popular. Did people oppose it saying something like, "kids these days don't appreciate a hot meal", or did they quickly embrace this new form of consumption? These are the things that haunt me. We may never know.
 

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Interview question of the week

Last time we had some fun answers submitted online. Check out this fun one from Jordan Scales!
This week's question:

Write a simple postfix calculator function that takes in a string expression and returns the result.

Example usage:

postfix('5 4 * 6 2 / +')
> 23

Here's a hint if you don't know what postfix is!
 

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Cool things from around the internet

Keyboard Connectivity: A Global Excursion in Making Stuff
How to draw a Celtic knot
7 fiction books that change the way you think
 

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Jokes

This one is courtesy of a friendly Lyft driver:
A lawyer is sitting next to a woman on a train and is bored.  He decides to make a wager with her to pass the time. The wager is that if he asks her a question and she doesn’t know the answer, she has to give him $5. But, if she asks him a question he doesn’t know he’ll give her $500. She reluctantly agrees to the wager.
The lawyer’s first question to her is "what is the distance from the Earth to the Moon?" She doesn’t know, so she gives him $5.
Her turn. She asks him a riddle: "What has four legs going uphill, three legs going downhill?" He gets on his phone and tries to look up the answer. Nothing. He calls his friends and they don’t know the answer either. He acquiesces and gives her $500, and stops playing the game.
Later on during the trip, the lawyer begs her for the answer because its killing him. She gives him $5.

And another one that I owe y'all for missing last week:
Why can't you use "beef stew" as a password?
Because it's not stroganoff.
 

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And there ya go! Hope y'all have a lovely weekend. Be safe, and make good choices.

cassidoo

Hey friends!

First of all, before moving on to anything else, I just wanted to give you a quick thanks for signing up for this. You definitely didn't have to.  But I'm hoping that this thanks makes you feel emotionally obligated enough to not unsubscribe.

Now, because this is my first note out to everyone, I'm going to try a format and if it's good, we'll stick with it. If you hate it, that's okay, you can feel free to reply back and let me know what you'd like to change. I'm here for YOU. Hope that makes you feel powerful.
 

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Web links of the week

This will normally be a list of development-related articles that I read each week. Some might be old. But usually not.

The Red Programming Language
The Basics of DOM Manipulation in Vanilla JavaScript
Grid paintings à la Mondrian with JavaScript
List of JavaScript Game Engines
 

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Something that interested me this week

I asked on dev.to about text-based game engines. There were some neat resources that might be of interest to you:

Quest
astrosilverio/hogwarts
Ink
Inform7
 

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Interview question of the week

Thought it might be good for you to get your brain moving each week. I'll post a random (not too hard!) interview question here for your practice! So, this week's question is:

Write a function that takes in a number from 1 to 1000 and returns that number in Roman Numerals.
 

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Cool things from around the internet

Not everything on the internet is about tech. Shockingly. Here's some fun things I've found and seen that are fun and worth looking at!

How I learned to draw realistic portraits in 30 days
No Small Plans: A graphic novel adventure through Chicago
A cool mechanical keyboard build log from Reddit
Motion Design: Awesome work of Eyedesyn
 

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And there you have it! Hope you enjoyed. Or at least tolerated it enough to stick with it. Or hated it enough to let me know that I should try a different idea. But not something crazy, like eating really hot peppers. Maybe you could suggest I try whittling wood blocks.

Until next time, friends!
cassidoo