Binary Search in JavaScript
05 September 2018
Hello everyone. I know in my last post I said I would start my journey through data structures in JavaScript. Instead, I decided to take a slight detour into search algorithms. I had a live code challenge through HackerRank where the solution required an implementation of binary search. So, while it is fresh in my mind, I thought I would take everyone through this awesome search algorithm. An Introduction If you have an familiarity with Binary Search Trees, you may already be familiar with the underlying concepts that drive the efficiency of binary search. Binary Search Trees work on the...
read moreAn Introduction to Data Structures in JavaScript
22 August 2018
Hello everyone. Back again after another long hiatus. I have been buried in trying to find a job this summer. It has been a long and intense road so far, but I have already learned a lot in my post boot camp life. One of the things I have been learning are the computer science fundamentals many larger companies require you to know to be successful in their technical interviews. I interviewed at the beginning of August. It was very intense, and while I was ultimately rejected, I found all of the time I devoted to learning data structures and...
read moreSetting up a Web Development Environment on Windows: Part 2
01 July 2018
As discussed in my previous post, I want to cover a few extraneous things needed to complete the setup of your Windows dev environment: Bash profiles Heroku CLI NPM and Yarn Windows environment variables Setting up Atom and Atom Package Manager Bash Profiles A bash profile is a script file that is loaded into your bash terminal when it opens. With it you can set things like formatting, alias commands, and load packages into your terminal environment (RVM modifies your bash profile to work correctly). You can find a lot of prebuilt bash profiles online, so find one you like...
read moreSetting up a Web Development Environment on Windows: Part 1
24 June 2018
Hello everyone. I’m finally back after a long break after graduating from Flatiron School. That doesn’t mean I stopped coding, but it does mean that I took a break from blog posts. Now I’m back and I’m ready to go. I thought for my first blog post it would be appropriate to write about the first thing I did after I finished up at Flatiron: setup a web development environment on my home custom built desktop. Since its a gaming machine, it runs Windows. Flatiron requires a MacOSX environment, so I borrowed one of their laptops for the duration of...
read moreGetting Started with the React Beautiful Drag and Drop Library
12 April 2018
Today I am going to discuss setting up the React Beautiful Drag and Drop library. I used this library in my first React project. As disclaimed in the documentation, this drag and drop is only for ordered lists. While it was a pain to setup, once it was working it worked well for its intended purpose. However, the same cannot be said of the documentation, which does not contain enough examples to make it easy to use. As a result, me and my partner struggled for an entire day to implement drag and drop in our project.
read moreSoftware Development Kits
19 March 2018
Today I am going to give a general overview of Software Development Kits (SDKs). SDKs are the more developed cousins of APIs. An API is an interface that allows software to interact with other software. They are mainly used as ways to get and store data from an application. An API has certain URL endpoints and commands that allow a developer to interact with an applications data.
read moreRails: Custom Slugs and Params
26 February 2018
My first Rails project at Flatiron School presented some unique challenges for my partner and I to solve. This blog post will go over some of these challenges and how we solved them. Hopefully it can be a resource to other beginner Rails developers in taking their projects to the next level. If you want to take look the final product of my Module 2 project, you can find it here.
read moreRuby: Some Syntactic Sugar and Other Cool Tricks
05 February 2018
During the first 3 weeks of my time at Flatiron School, I have learned a lot of useful tricks in Ruby that simplify logic and make code significantly easier to read. Ruby is chock full of what the programming world calls syntatic sugar: mechanisms for writing complicated language constructs in a much more succinct way. Most beginner rubyists are already using a lot of Ruby’s built in syntatic sugar and don’t even know it. The purpose of this blog post is to give some more advanced examples that many beginners will find useful. There are a lot of resources out...
read moreSQL: Temporary Tables and Efficiency
22 January 2018
During my 3 years working with SQL, one of the most effective tools I learned for increasing query execution speed is the temporary table. Temp tables are created from existing tables in a database and can be generally used to process intermediate results in more complex queries. They are unique in the respect that they are created in a temp database parallel to the working databases and are deleted after the connection to the database is closed.
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