And Building Better APIs
GraphQL is a query language (that’s what the QL stands for) developed by Facebook that provides us with a more efficient way to design, create, and access APIs.
It aims to improve upon the conventional API request process by allowing you to configure the structure and content of the data you ask for when making a request.
The general pattern is:
Prior to GraphQL the standard was to build REST APIs which all follow a strict guideline for making your API requests. …
If you’re a Jr. Developer from a non-CS background (maybe you completed a boot camp like myself or maybe you’re self taught) there’s a good chance you have asked yourself something like “Why do I need to learn what a Binary Search Tree is? I just want to design websites!” I definitely had this thought and even rebelled against the idea of learning data structures at first.
But here’s the issue. Once I started applying to full-time jobs or even internships at companies I liked, they all began sending me DSA heavy coding challenges.
So, begrudgingly I began the long…
Using Recursion, Memoization and Tabulation
This is a classing dynamic programming problem that goes something like this:
“Given a list of coin values (e.g. 1¢, 5¢, 10¢, 25¢) what’s the minimum number of coins you can use to return a specified amount (e.g. 59¢)?
First, we will solve this problem recursively.
The first step when dealing with recursion is to set up your base case. In this example, it makes sense that when the amount is 0¢ we want to return 0. There is only one way to return nothing, and that's by giving no coins.
function minChange(coins, amount){if…
Today we’ll be building a simple countdown timer in React with the following functionality:
Get started by using the create react app package through npm to set up your React application. Type the following into the terminal:
npx create-react-app simple-timer
For more info on create-react-app go here
If you’re familiar with React you’ll know that by default the App.js component acts as the parent component for our application. It comes with a bunch of standard code when you use create-react-app, but for now let’s delete all of the unnecessary code…
Even if you’re strictly a Frontend Developer!
Python is great for Web Development offering amazing web frameworks like Django which make it extremely efficient to spin up web applications. However it’s real advantage is its versatility.
The most common use cases for python are data science, data analysis and software engineering, but other use cases for Python include:
Python is the most popular programming language in the world and roughly 30% of all code is written in Python.
This popularity means…
One of many rites of passage in the software engineer’s journey
So you just took your first coding challenge. It’s possible it was a take home type of test, or maybe a whiteboarding exercise, or maybe even a (::shudders::) live coding review. It doesn’t matter the format. Unless you are the most extreme of outliers, at some point in your career you will encounter a challenge that you aren’t able to solve as well as you wanted to. You will inevitably go through the phases of anguish and self-doubt that come with bombing a coding challenge. But fear not, we’ve…
And why using OAuth for authentication is not best practice
Both words look similar, sound similar, and even can both be abbreviated as “Auth”. However it is a common misunderstanding that these words can be used interchangeably. Heck, even I thought so when I was first learning about the two, and it took me so long to sort the differences out in my head that I decided to write this blog to help others in a similar situation.
So what the heck is the difference??
Authentication - the process of verifying an identity. …
If you have not yet completed the steps in Part 1 of setting up a Rails environment and pulling down the data from the API, please go back and read my last article here. Assuming you’ve completed these steps, let's continue on to the next part.
As mentioned in the last article, in this example our four categories for comparison are a game’s:
Using Ruby’s Vector class, and some custom Rails methods
There are 2 widely used systems to recommend products to customers, whether that product be physical goods like Amazon sells, television shows or movies like Netflix, or even other user’s profile pages like Facebook.
Collaborative filtering compares the likes, dislikes, and trends of user’s to match them with other similar users, and then recommend them products based on what the other similar user’s enjoy. For example, if User A watches a bunch of the same Rom-Coms on Netflix as User B, and both users rate them similarly, if User A finds…
Using react-dnd
The drag and drop is one the most basic and important actions a person learns when they are first introduced to a computer with a GUI (Graphical User Interface). The first time I remember performing the action is back on my PC running Windows 95 when I dragged a file over my Trash Bin Icon and dropped it in, effectively deleting the file.
The premise has not changed much since then. At its base simplicity, the steps are as follows:
SWE