What will I learn today?

1. I am moving towards application to Microsoft LEAP program - http://www.industryexplorers.com/applicants. What should I do to fit better? My deadline is 15 September 2017.
2. FreeCodeCamp project: Wikipedia viewer.

Done

2. User Story:

• I can search Wikipedia entries in a search box and see the resulting Wikipedia entries.
• I can click a button to see a random Wikipedia entry.

Completed initial search functionality. Wikimedia engine contains tons of functionality. Looks intimidating at first. There is a need for less twisted documentation, something like a roadmap where you can get the overall view before diving into details.

My idea is to display data the user is searching for right on the page. If many pages are found, then give a user the same look as Wiki gives - many topics on one page. But the overall idea is to connect voice recognition engine with wiki search to get all power of current state of AI.

What will I learn today?

I am moving towards application to Microsoft LEAP program - http://www.industryexplorers.com/applicants. What should I do to fit better? My deadline is 15 September 2017.

Done

1. How to terminate (stop, interrupt) Chrome session without closing tab? Go to

   Menu → More Tools → Task Manager
   

   find the task hanging, press End process button.

   From here - https://stackoverflow.com/a/27261978/2255031.

2. How to calculate number of unique words in a file with *nix shell

   cat someFileName.txt | tr ' ' '\n' | sort | uniq -c | awk '{print $2": "$1}'
   

   and you've got your numbers.

What will I learn today?

I am moving towards application to Microsoft LEAP program - http://www.industryexplorers.com/applicants. What should I do to fit better? My deadline is 15 September 2017.

Done

My resume in md: https://gist.github.com/al1s/d5a3b2fe02eaa4a75e3ab2ed3d2073a8

There are two essay topics in an application form:

What will I learn today?

I am moving towards application to Microsoft LEAP program - http://www.industryexplorers.com/applicants. What should I do to fit better? My deadline is 15 September 2017.

Done

My tagline is "Let's look how far stubbornness and curiosity would take me". In order to prepare as best as possible I follow the plan:

• rewrite my resume so it clearly shows my web-development skill;
• syncronize my Linkedin profile with resume;
• write an article dedicated to web development;
• build a portfolio page;

I'm done with the first and just finished the draft of the third. Here is tools I used to write it:

• an analyzer to make your headline good - https://coschedule.com/headline-analyzer;
• an analyzer to calculate readability level of the text - http://www.hemingwayapp.com/;
• a Flickr license retriever - http://www.imagecodr.org/;
• an article with useful advice - https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-to-get-published-in-the-freecodecamp-medium-publication-9b342a22400e;

What will I learn today?

Dive into JS.

Done

Who this article addresses to? - developers who starts they journey. What I want to show? - System approach to an implementation. What is my system of interest? - Users who wants to check current weather condition. We've got user story list.

Implementing the FreeCodeCamp project - Local weather app.

User stories (published on the appointment page - https://www.freecodecamp.org/challenges/show-the-local-weather):

• I can see the weather in my current location.
• I can see a different icon or background image (e.g. snowy mountain, hot desert) depending on the weather.
• I can push a button to toggle between Fahrenheit and Celsius.

I want to mention that I haven't seen example app (https://codepen.io/freeCodeCamp/full/bELRjV) before I've finished my initial working prototype so all considerations below are based on common sense. I want to move along the plan below to demonstrate my implementation process.

1. Design considerations:

• pure JS;
• minimalistic design;
• a11y is for accessability and it's one of the goals;
• responsive design;

2. Plan of the app:

• fetch data from weather API;
• prepare visual representation of the page depending on data fetched; * get the photo which reflect the current condition; * get the color depicting current temperature;
• use HTTP cookie to store user scale preference - celsius or fahrenheit;

3. Challenges and implementation:

• CSS variables don't work with CSS SVG styles - solved;
• Geolocation silently dies on tablets and phones - solved;
• CORS for WeatherUnderground's autocomplete API - solved;
• Support for a wide range of browsers - solved.

Through the plan of the implementation

API to get weather

My weather API is Weather Underground (WU) - https://www.wunderground.com/. Why it's not OpenWeatherMap - I use WU everyday for about a year and it provides the consistent reliable result. I've used fetch as a method to get data. But there was a catch. Check challenges section for details.

Visual elements of the page

Photos are taken from Flickr. They all are under Creative Commons licenses. Here is the full list:

As I mentioned above I changed the color of the box where weather details appear according to the current air temperature. The mapping is:

Color temperature mapping

Color	Temperature range
#A50021	more than 30
#D82632	between 25 and 30
#F76D5E	between 20 and 25
#FFAD72	between 15 and 20
#FFE099	between 10 and 15
#FFFFBF	between 5 and 10
#E0FFFF	between 0 and 5
#AAF7FF	between -5 and 0
#72D8FF	between -10 and -5
#3FA0FF	between -15 and -10
#264CFF	between -20 and -15

User preferences

I don't want to toggle scale all the time from Fahrenheit to Celsius (the last one are natural for me but I use Fahernheit as default scale) so I added cookies to keep user preferences. There are three additional functions to create, read and erase cookie. Functions are taken from QuirksMode - https://www.quirksmode.org/js/cookies.html, but I modified read to use regexp instead of a loop.

What will I learn today?

Dive into JS.

Done

Digged into project of a quotation machine from FreeCodeCamp (here - https://www.freecodecamp.org/challenges/build-a-random-quote-machine). The results are:

• as a Codepen playground - https://codepen.io/alstof/pen/qjzzMb;
• as a single page -

Learned/recalled:

• don't use function call in callback - just function name needed, so no parenthesis - function(params, callback()) vs function(params, callback), here is SO - https://stackoverflow.com/a/21616421;
• dinamically regenerate twitter button to get desired tweet text inside a twitter web intent (what is web intent described in the article about twitter button - https://dev.twitter.com/web/tweet-button)- https://twittercommunity.com/t/how-to-replace-data-text-content-with-javascript-variable/19404/4;
• practiced fetch, encountered CORS obstacles - quote API and Codepen don't allow cross origin js, solved it with proxy - https://cors-anywhere.herokuapp.com/;
• found a couple of this quote API - first is Forismatic - https://forismatic.com/en/api/ and second is WikiQuote - https://github.com/natetyler/wikiquotes-api.

What will I learn today?

Dive into JS.

Done

I've done the first part of algorithm challenges at freeCodeCamp. All code in one place is here - https://codepen.io/alstof/pen/VWNPbM.

Among other challenges there was one which I think will help me with hackerRank's Climbing the Leaderboard. It was about evaluating the place for any number in an arbitrary array. So I can easily apply the same approach to ranking elements of one array among the other.

What will I learn today?

Dive into JS.

Done

I'm stuck with both challenges on HR - roads and ladder failed performance test and roads failed functional tests. It's very exhaustive to run through the code again and again without success especially in time shortage conditions. Switched to another coding activity - returned to freeCodeCamp curriculum to practice easy steps, to make them smoother. After it I'll plan to be back and crack these nuts.

I've practiced:

• the easiest way to compare arrays is to JSON.stringify them, but it's bad for performamce. Better way described here - https://stackoverflow.com/a/14853974.
• the way to put variable inside regExp is to initialize it as a regExp object new RegExp('someText' + variable) - https://stackoverflow.com/a/4029123.

What will I learn today?

Dive into JS.

Done

I've solved Queen attack II. It wasn't hard, but in some way mind bending. The next two challenges are Roads and libraries - https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/torque-and-development and Climbing the leaderboard - https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/climbing-the-leaderboard. I solved both, but my solutions didn't meet time complexity criteria, so now I'm in optimization mode.

My approach to Roads and libs is:

• The idea is to find whether we have a connected graph.
• If not, then we need at least the same number of libraries as independent graphs.
• If graph is connected, we build at least one library.
• If library cost > road cost, fix all roads, otherwise, build a library in every town.
• In order to find the graph roots and edges I built node adjacency list and all nodes list.

The last two are sources of latency. At first I tried to build all nodes list by concatenating all nodes within forEach loop and then moving the result into a set to get a list of nodes without repetitions. I've got rid of concatenation, and just pushed all nodes into flat array and then copied it into a set. The adjacency list is looked harder. I want to get a list of all nodes with their neighbours for each. I use for it an array and each position is my node number filled with arrays of neighbours. Maybe the better idea is to use object for storing the list.

In order to understand how my solution works under load I use a dataset I've found under the first link here - https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/a/740.

The solution works faster with an object as a storage of adjacency list, but it fails HR performance tests.

What will I learn today?

1. Dive into JS.

Done

1. Moving to another appartment took tons of time and efforts. Now we've settled and I'm able to continue my practice. The last problem was too tough. I'm stuck with all exceptional cases and it still doesn't pass all tests. Let's move on.

   Next problem is Queen attack II - https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/queens-attack-2. The approach was to take it as a distance appraisal problem. There is only 2d space with relative center of coordinates (which is a queen position) and available routes on it (only vertical, horizontal and both diagonals). And the solution is to find length of each route and get a total:

   • appraise whether an obstacle is on any available route and find distance to each;
   • find distance from queen position to any side of the board in any direction available.

   My first thought was to implement a simple function which would return me a distance in math way - as a square root of the sum of squared differences of respective point coordinates. It's obvious that it won't work - I have longer distances diagonally, than in vertical and horizontal directions. Next move - why not take it simpler: the distance in board squares is already here - it's just any of coordinates (because my diagonals are at 45 degrees to horizontal line).

   The next question was how to find whether an obstacle is on the queen way or not? The solution was to find the angle between two sections. The most obvious way is to find a tangent (because I already know both cathetus - they are just obstacle coordinates) and apply Math.atan to it.