I really hate not knowing the answer. I also hate not knowing what to say. But, it really doesn't matter how much you prepare for your interviews beforehand. The situation is bound to come up. The interviewer asks you a question and you simply don't know the answer.

Do you know what I do in that situation? I get very flustered, probably throw in a nervous giggle or two, and then respond. It's not pretty. However, something I keep reminding myself, an interview is a conversation. By following up the “I don't know” with more context you can help direct…

What's the secret to being an algorithms master? Well, I don't know, I haven't even completed a LeetCode Hard problem yet. But I’ll tell you my strategy for getting better at them: see every single problem that exists.

Ok, that's obviously not possible. But the more you see the better! Also, you don't really need to see every problem, but rather every single type of problem. Have you ever heard the saying “There's no such thing as an original idea”? Apparently, Mark Twain said that; I had to google it. But that's the idea behind algorithms as well. They all…

Let's continue on the functional programming journey this week. One of the biggest things that scared me about learning Haskell and Functional Programming was that I had heard that they don't use loops. No loops!? That's crazy, I code with loops left, right, and center. What do you mean there are no loops? It's such a basic fundamental tool. Also, why don't we use them? What do you do instead? This was very overwhelming as you can see. Below I’ll summarize my understanding of why functional programming languages usually emphasize the use of recursion (or higher-order functions) over loops and…

It's been a long time since I’ve written a blog! I had a wonderful vacation but I just know everyone is dying to know what my next project is. It's Haskell! This week I’ve been learning the basics of functional programming and Haskell. But Sara, why are you moving away from Object-Oriented Programming? Why Haskell?

That’s a good question. The chart below ranks programming languages based on the PYPL PopularitY of Programming Language Index. This is determined by analyzing how often tutorials for a specific language are searched on Google. Where is Haskell? …

For the last few weeks, I’ve been on vacation. My husband and I are spending some time in the lovely city of San Francisco and getting some much-needed sun. I’ll admit I haven't been coding much and being a developer is not the priority this month. However, I’m here. Writing this blog. Because I simply can't escape it and my curiosity got the better of me.

This time, it was elevators. I went to visit a friend and she lives in a tall building near downtown San Francisco. I walked up to the elevators and had a rather confusing experience…

I was practicing my algorithm and data structures on LeetCode when I ran into something intriguing about “If” statements. I had the following code:

for (let i =0; i<m; i++){
   for (let j =0; j<n; j++){
      if (matrix[i][j]%2 != 0) count++
   }
}

I was looping over every element in a 2D array and increasing the count if the value was odd. Quite simple, and in my head, I wanted to increase the count “if” a condition was true so I used the if statement. My solution worked and Leetcode gave me the following statistics:

• Runtime: 92 ms, beats 46.58…

While continuing my Udemy course on web development, I came across an interesting concept. The instructor explained an architectural decision he had made, he was going to use the CQRS pattern. The comments section was flooded. Why use that pattern? Why not use plain CRUD? Are there other alternatives? To address this, the instructor brought up the golden hammer anti-pattern which essentially says there isn't any one pattern that will work for everything.

The Golden Hammer? What Is It?

The golden hammer in software development is an anti-pattern. A common response or practice that is considered bad practice and is usually ineffective. …

I’ve been gaining confidence in my algorithm solving skills. So much so that I’ve graduated to the medium difficulty Leetcode problems. Yay! Can I effortlessly solve every problem I see? Hell no! I'm at the stage where given the problem I can normally come up with a working brute force solution. However, when it comes to finding the most optimized answer, I usually look for a few hints. But that's ok! …