maximumProfit - Interview question of the week from rendezvous with cassidoo
If I’m going to use Elixir, I might as well make use of its pattern matching!
Programming
explodeString - Interview question of the week from rendezvous with cassidoo
I’m doing some work in Elixir now, so I figure I’d take a shot at this week’s question with Elixir.
missingLetters - Interview question of the week from rendezvous with cassidoo
Simple, no-frills solution to this week’s question.
trimArray - Interview question of the week from rendezvous with cassidoo
There’s a really simple one-liner for arrays, but what about using this with generators? (i.e., the iterator pattern where a length is not known until reaching the end of the iteration)
mmmPie - Interview question of the week from rendezvous with cassidoo
How can I write a piece of code that can be written quickly and trivially understood? I think it’s mostly good variable names in this case. (And I handle infinite pie!)
binaryPal - Interview question of the week from rendezvous with cassidoo
What’s faster: a typical JavaScript implementation of .toString() and some basic string manipulation or clever bit shifting? (TL;DR: It’s bit shifting, but it’s uglier code.)
oddSquareSum - Interview question of the week from rendezvous with cassidoo
In this case, writing tests to prove the solution was far more interesting than the solution itself.
removeZeroes - Interview question of the week from rendezvous with cassidoo
The simple case wasn’t hard, but the low-memory iterator pattern was a fun, self-imposed challenge.
rollDice (by ChatGPT) - Interview question of the week from rendezvous with cassidoo
I decided to tinker with ChatGPT while working on an answer to this week’s question. While each implementation was passable and useful as a starting point, it became almost immediately clear that ChatGPT’s contextual understanding of its own output is fairly limited. Iterating with ChatGPT on its own technical output...
scramble - Interview question of the week from rendezvous with cassidoo
The tests were harder than the implementation 🥴
numBalanced - Interview question of the week from rendezvous with cassidoo
This one was fun to think about the minimal amount of processing needed to produce the result. In this case, the question is carefully worded to allow naive processing that’s really fast.
Apple HomeKit-enabled workshop air quality monitor
After I built the cardboard stock sorting shelf, I had about a week of breathing issues as a result of poor ventilation from the sawdust and particulate in the air in my garage. Resolved to avoid another week of feeling crummy, I bought a beefy fan and have eventual plans...
A1 Reference Style Spreadsheet Column Names - Interview question of the week from rendezvous with cassidoo
Nice little brain teaser involving number base conversion 😄
missingBits - Interview question of the week from rendezvous with cassidoo
Nice, bite-sized algorithm question.
Spin the Wheel - Interview question of the week from rendezvous with cassidoo
Well, I spent quite a bit more time on this tonight than I’d originally anticipated. It’s not pretty, but it does work and has a little bit of viable game theory.
sumEveryOther - Interview question of the week from rendezvous with cassidoo
This was a fun, light interview question this week.
Updated Flipper Zero CO2 Monitor
Well, I finally got around to updating my CO2 Monitor to take advantage of the latest APIs in the Flipper Zero firmware. (It wasn’t quite as bad as I thought it would be 😅) Now it even has its own application icon!
Guidelines for backlog refinement sessions
Formerly referred to as “backlog grooming,” backlog refinement is the process of defining pieces of work and estimating the amount of effort required to complete them. Backlog refinement requires buy-in from developers, testers, and stakeholders (product managers, business folks, etc.). Doing this refinement work results in a clearer understanding of...
rectangleSum - Interview question of the week from rendezvous with cassidoo
This one was tricky to stay mindful of the number of iterations.
Manually calibrating the Sensiron SCD30 CO2 gas concentration sensor
I picked up an Aranet4 Home CO2 sensor on a Black Friday sale and have finally had the chance to run a commercially-calibrated CO2 sensor against my DIY CO2 monitor on the Flipper Zero and found that my sensor needed some calibration.
verticalSlashes - Interview question of the week from rendezvous with cassidoo
I do enjoy getting Cassidy’s newsletter late Sunday/early Monday and trying my hand at the “interview [questions] of the week.”
How working on Developer Experience (DX) improved knowledge sharing and enabled more developers to contribute to a project
A four-year old Android app installed on thousands of transit buses needed some serious improvements to usability and reliability. The product team proposed a bold vision for improving the user experience for bus operators, but the development team was mired in a codebase that was hard to understand, difficult to...
Writing software that works with hardware
I’ve been working on a lot of hardware projects lately: making text-to-speech appliances work on transit vehicles, making software for internet-connected signs, prototyping tools to help me make good health decisions, and building out my go-sensors libraries to support physical environment sensors. I’ve spent a lot of my time as...
A story about protocols and documentation
In April 2021, I had a problem at work: I didn’t understand how our on-vehicle application communicated with the text-to-speech appliance to make next stop announcements.
Prototyping a real CO2 monitor on the Flipper Zero
Updated January, 12, 2023
Prototyping a volatile organic compound (VOC) and CO2 monitor on the Flipper Zero
I’ve been playing with environment sensors for a while to help me understand how factors of air quality correlate to my health. In 2019, I had a particularly bad asthma attack that was exacerbated by wildfires in California. Since then, I’ve learned a lot about how 2.5 micron particulate matter...
Using Excel to make changes to GTFS feeds
In my work at GMV, I’ve had need to inspect and edit General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) feeds on numerous occasions. A GTFS static feed is simply a ZIP file containing several CSV-formatted text files that describe the routes and schedules of a transit agency. Because GTFS is a specification...
Interviewed for "How to plan smarter for event-driven architecture design"
I was interviewed by my friend and author, Bob Reselman on the topic of designing systems with event-driven architecture (EDA). His article–which includes a great primer on how to think in terms of events–is published at RedHat’s Enable Architect.
mRNA Vaccine Visualization (and cute frame for my vaccination record card)
I grew up with my mom telling me stories about chicken pox, and then a few of my friends caught it. I avoided catching the pox and I was able to be vaccinated against it. Now I’m an adult with a significant protection against shingles! I think vaccines are fantastic...
I tried to make a watering device for my cat
My cat has an addiction to drinking directly from the tub’s faucet. We’ve tried to get him nice water dishes and electric pump water fountains, but he just craves that good, good tub water. (And is extremely vocal about when he wants to drink.)
How I Built a Twitter Bot Using Auth0 Webtasks and Data.gov
I wanted to build something small, fun, and socially-engaging. I have been following Darius Kazemi (@TinySubversions) and the community of bot makers at Botwiki (@Botwikidotorg), and I decided a Twitter bot was the way to go. I have also been following the US Executive Order 13792 pretty closely. The order...
MQTT, Mono, and ARM
I wrote a .NET program to test building and cross-compiling an application to run on a Sierra Wireless AirLink RV50 gateway.
Think LINQ – .SequenceEqual()
Up until March 26, I had come up with a number of crazy concoctions to test whether one IEnumerable<> was equal to another. Some of them chained together .Intersect() with .Count(), comparing the count of the elements in the intersected set with the count of the elements in each of...
Think LINQ – .Skip() and .Take()
Needing to page through a collection is nothing new, and LINQ handles this nicely with two different methods: .Skip() and .Take(). The .Skip() method will skip over a specified number of items in an IEnumerable<>. The .Take() method will iterate over a specified number of items of an IEnumerable<> and...
Think LINQ – .Any() and .All()
“I just want to know if there’s anything in this List.” “Do any of the strings in my array start with ‘q’?” “How can I be sure all of the Rectangles in my IEnumerable<> have a width of 10?” These are the types of questions .Any() and .All() can answer....
Think LINQ – .SelectMany()
I recently came across a beautiful example of .SelectMany() used to find all types that implement a particular interface in all currently loaded assemblies. With minor alterations, here is how I used it:
Think LINQ – .ToLookup()
There is an class in the .NET generic collection framework that is often overlooked: Lookup<>. In effect, a Lookup<> functions like a Dictionary<> whose value is an IEnumerable<>. Though Lookup<T,U> is an implementation of IEnumerable<IGrouping<T, U>>, it functions with a similar efficiency to Dictionary<T,IEnumerable<U>>. Part of the LINQ extension methods...
Think LINQ – .ToDictionary()
There are a number of reasons to use Dictionary<> objects. Aside from the obvious name-value pair uses, Dictionary<> can also be used to essentially “index” an IEnumerable<> of objects. In testing with my colleague, Ryan Davis, we found that for IEnumerable<> collections that we intended to search through on a...
Think LINQ – .Cast()
Personally, I find that .Cast() is an often overlooked part of LINQ. Of course, .Cast() is handy when casting each element of an IEnumerable<> from one type to another. However, one detail in its method signature brings to light a much more interesting use: .Cast() extends IEnumerable, the non-generic interface,...
Think LINQ – The Wonder of IEnumerable<>
Language INtegrated Query, or LINQ, is a .NET feature that makes possible a powerful and extensible query on objects and collections thereof. LINQ is really a combination of a few key components: extension methods and generic collections. Understanding these two key components makes it much easier to “Think LINQ” when...