What To Say When You Don't Know The Answer To An Interview Question — 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…

JavaScript Solution Using Level Order Traversal — 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…

Functional Programming and Haskell — 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…

My Intro into Functional Programming — 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…

How Destination Elevator Algorithms Are More Efficient — 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…

Performance Cost of Using If Statements and Branch Predictor — 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…

Why You Need Career Shifters Like Me — 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? …

Two Pointer JavaScript Solution Walkthrough — 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…

Cost-benefit analysis and red flags to be wary of — A couple of weeks ago I had my first take-home coding challenge as part of the interview process for a company. I started researching take-home challenges to learn some tips and make sure I was following best practices. After I read some personal experiences of developers doing take-home challenges, I…