I do it for my cat

I've been helping a colleague with his portfolio site. He's making it retro video game themed at my suggestion. He found an interesting pixelated font called arcade classic  and used it for the headings on his page. Unfortunately, some of the letters almost overlapped, making it not quite readable. Before letter spacing I looked into typography ages ago and learnt about letter and word spacing and wondered if that was something that I could fiddle with using CSS. Turns out it is a property you can customise. I opened up Chrome Dev tools and added 3 pixels of letter spacing and it looked so much better. And there's letter spacing too, so that's pretty neat.  After letter spacing Can't say CSS is my favourite thing ever but it's always nice to learn something new in unexpected ways.

I have been with the Tech Academy both as a software developer bootcamp student, as well as an employee. After my bootcamp, I was hired first as the live project instructor, and then as Live Project Director. This, I believe, gives me a unique point of view. I have absolutely no regrets and would join the bootcamp again. But there are a number of things I would do differently. What I have learnt as a former student 1. DO NOT WORK PART TIME.   I worked part-time(20-30hrs) during my bootcamp. I was up at 2.30-3.00am every day to work for several hours. I took a short nap, and then I took a 1hr bus ride down to campus. Studied for 7- 9 hours. Took a 1hr bus ride back home. Lather, rinse, repeat. I also had some family obligations. My weekends and half the summer were taken up caring for my young stepdaughter. I was completely exhausted by the end of the bootcamp and I didn't know if I could do more. Learning to program is HARD. You need to be fully focused. I am fortunate because I di

I was today years old when I found out what fizzbuzz was. Yes, I'm late to the party. I was in an interview where the interviewer mentioned that ordinarily they would ask interviewees in for a round of fizzbuzz challenges, as I know. Actually sir, no, I don't know 👀 But he sounded so certain that I must surely know what it is that I was afraid to say anything so I did what I always do when I panic. Look right back saying not a word. I googled this mysterious fizzbuzz problem:  It looks pretty easy. I don't think he meant this actual problem, but problems like this. Because this problem is way too easy to be an actual problem someone asks in an interview. I decided to work on it for fun:  Yup. Super easy. I wish this is all I were asked in an interview 😄 

 I wrote my first recursive function today! I've read about recursion and wanted to attempt it for the longest time. I kept letting fear get in the way. Working on problems with my team has definitely helped me learn more, faster. It has also helped with my confidence. I finally attempted a simple problem using recursion on LeetCode. I was meant to reverse a string.  First, I had to figure out how a recursive function worked exactly. When a function calls itself, it stops the execution of the rest of the code in the function until it reaches the "end" of the chain of function calls. The base case is what determines when the recursive function stops. Without a base case, it would keep calling itself forever like images reflecting off parallel mirrors facing each other. In my function, the base case is when the end of the list is reached, index >= len(s).  Once the base case is reached, it returns to the previous recursive function call on line 5 and line 6-12 are execut

 I'm working my way through the mini courses on LeetCode to understand data structures and algorithms better. I am currently on linked lists. After a few slides, I was tasked with creating a linked list. I had no idea what to do and was stuck on this problem for days. I would look at it for a bit, not know what to do, and try to work on something else, and not be able to focus on that something else because I didn't know what to do about the linked list. Meh! It was a long 3-4 days. I finally figured it out and I have to say I feel very pleased with myseld :D  Step 1: Define a node class and a linked list class.  Each node has a value and a pointer to the next node. There is just a single pointer here because I chose to create a singly linked list. You can also have a pointer in the reverse direction point at the previous node. That would be a doubly linked list. I also had to define my actual linked list which held the value for the head node.  Step 2: Create a get method to g

 This is a topic that I keep encountering but have struggled to fully grasp. To be fair I haven't looked too deeply into it. And now I am doing so. Python-course has a great article  on the topic. They really go step by step. I've summarised what was in the article and re-written it in a way I understand it better. A few notes about Python functions: Function names are references to functions and you can assign multiple names to the same function          e.g.  def func(x):                         return x                    func2 = func                    ==>> Calling either func2(4) or func(4) would give the same output as they are just references to the same function   Functions can be nested inside functions. I have done this a handful of times. Functions can accept other functions as arguments.  Functions can return functions These features are important in understanding how a decorator works. A decorator allows you to add additional features to functions by modifyin