Category: Software Engineering

“The Right It” by Alberto Savoia Book Review, PLUS a Midjourney Pretotyping Experiment

A week or two prior to this posting, I did an AI experiment to pretotype how capable ChatGPT was at writing code and wrote about it on LinkedIn. AI’s ability to code was unsurprising, everyone’s talking about it. But for some (or perhaps many) the concept of a pretotype was — surprising that is. “Pretotype?…
A Directory of Code Interview Questions

NOTE: THIS POST HAS BEEN DEPRECATED AS OF 11/22/20 … NO MORE UPDATES ARE EXPECTED ON THIS DIRECTORY…. This post will be the go to source for patterns, all of which will contain coding samples. If you’ve read Memorizing Code PART I, and Memorizing Code PART II, this is essentially “Part III” — or at…
Memorizing Code Patterns, PART II – A Glossary of Code Personified

In the previous blog, I mostly address “the why” of attempting to memorize code. In this blog, I follow up on the concept of a “memory palace”… an approach to organize the stuff you memorize. Rote memorization can work for a little while, but there’s no way you can do it for a deck of…
Memorizing Code, PART I

Everyone says you can’t. But you can. Memorization has gotten a bad wrap in favor of “understanding”. In short, the truth is: memorization (or memory) precedes understanding. You Cannot Understand Something That Does Not Exist (at least partially) In Your Memory. One might memorize the quote “Veni Vidi Vici” without having any understanding of it.…
Result and Reflection for “My Experiment to Crack the Coding Interview”

So… my mad ditch effort to pass the mock coding interview (written about in the previous blog here) was not a great success but not a great fail either. In short, I was unable to complete the coding challenge in time, but the interviewer suspected I’d have been able to complete it if given more…
An Experiment to Crack the Coding Interview

Having only graduated Flatiron Software Engineering School this past Monday, this blog post is somewhat speculative. It’s about a hypothesis, one that I will get to test very quickly thanks to a parting gift from Flatiron. A token to SkilledInc, where we get tested on our technical chops. One of the things that it seems…
“Big O” Notation Personified

Big O Notation… once you get practicing, it starts to fall into place, but wouldn’t it be nice if there WAS a magic bullet, something to help you memorize it from the beginning? Now, there is, sort of. Meet the “Big O” Cast of Characters. NOTE: these are just the major players. O(1), O(n), O(n^2),…
Database Associations in Plain English

A lot of beginners (myself included) seem to run into issues when it comes to back end associations/relationships for database models… NOTE: (this article is written in the context of ActiveRecord, so mostly applicable to Ruby programmers.) I also find that using Figma (etc.) to draw out the relationships can lead to an illusion of…
State, Props, and Stranger Things

State and Props. Two things crucial to understanding how we build components in React, and yet, while easy enough to regurgitate a definition… it become a bit more difficult to explain in one’s own words. Huge thanks to Flatiron instructor Derek Cerretani who helped me get to a point where I was able to believe…
Depth First Search… or Searching for Atlantis.

This is going to be a short one. Because the analogy here is much more intuitive and can more easily be applied to a range of circumstances… Imagine you’re on a yacht near the Bimini Islands searching for The Lost City of Atlantis. You have “reliable” info that the city may be somewhere in the…
Breadth First Search… or Unclogging The Bathtub

Encouraged by Flatiron instructor Jonathan Foster to make a blog post out of a Slack comment where I attempted to explain “Breadth First Search” in plain English, I thought it was time to finally kick off this blog about Better Heuristics for Understanding Code. If you don’t know what breadth first search is, you will…
Three Pointers

Three Pointers is almost identical to “two pointers” except there is a third pointer (or “pincer”). This is useful for “three number sums”, or going with the ball factory example from the Two Pointer post, perhaps an item where three different balls are packaged together. A use case that I find fascinating might be K…