In my previous post I outlined all of the ways that I’ve attempted to quantify my life over the years. In this post I’m going to dive into the applications that I’ve found only recently! I was looking to be able to track my running, sleeping and screen time. Luckily I was able to find easy ways of tracking all of those!

The “Quanitified Self” movement has been relatively popular over the last couple of years. Since college I’ve dipped my toes in the water with a few different things, but recently I’ve decided to dive in head first. There are a ton of different apps that I’m using, so I’m going to document them here for myself and others that want to do similarly!

A little over a year and a half ago some colleagues and I really started pushing for a more sane branching strategy. It was a bit of the wild west in terms of who could commit directly to master/develop and how things got merged in. Part of this was great in that it allowed us to iterate extremely quickly, but also caused some major problems when someone accidentally merged in some breaking code.

One of my friends recently referred me to this terrific programming challenge, The Advent of Code. Every night at midnight (EST) for 25 nights a new puzzle comes out. Then tens of thousands of developers rush to be the first one to complete the challenge. There are no requirements regarding how you solve the problem, but they obviously would recommend that using a computer is usually optimal.

Once in awhile some of my gaming friends and I will standup a Minecraft server to play around for a weekend or so. To make this easier I put together a script that handles all of the install and management for me. We use a Spigot server which allows us to add plugins to tune the game a bit to our needs. We use Digital Ocean for our hosting which has been terrific so far!

I am absolutely obsessed with the TV show, The Office. My friends and I are constantly quoting the show. So much so that I decided to make a twitter bot that randomly tweets out quotes! I was hoping to be able to find a database or an API with a substantial amount of quotes, unfortunately I haven’t found anything like this. So this is where my work began.

I’ve been getting more involved with politics since the 2016 Presidential Election and one thing that has really attracted my attention has been the Federal budget. The US Federal budget is right around 4 trillion dollars. Which is just beating China for the largest budget in the world (~3.5T). The next largest budget comes in with Germany at around 1.7T. So needless to say I was curious as to where all of this money came from and where all of it goes.

I’ve been using Habitica for a little over a year now and absolutely love it. It’s basically just a complicated To-Do list with some different options around repeating tasks with a mix of gamification to keep me interested. Over the past couple of weeks there have been times when I have found myself having my hands full and not being able to manually add tasks when I wanted to. So the next obvious step is to figure out a way around that.

Hackerrank emailed me this one and figured I would give it a go. Given 5 numbers determine the min and max sums of 4 of those numbers. I’ve expanded my solution to work for n numbers given they are in an array. Trying this one in python as well!

Next one in the CTCI list was a stack question, probably one of the most underrated data structures. The problem can be found here. The main gist is that you get a string and need to determine if the string has properly balanced brackets. So for example…

Jump back to HackerRank to do another CTCI problem. Picked the next one on the list and it involes anagrams. Can be found here.

Been awhile since I’ve dealt with some linked lists so figured I would work through a cycle detection problem. I picked this one here from HackerRank.

Picked up this problem from HackerRank. Basic overview of the problem is that you get 2 groups of strings, Then you need to evaluate how many times the second set of strings appears in the first group of strings. The input will also supply the length of each array before printing it out.

So I stumbled across this article the other day on Hacker News and thought it was worth responding to. I’m fairly certain this is satire, but I’ve hard a few friends at the soulless corporations basically echo these thoughts, so I’ll respond anyway.

Back in college I read Cracking the Coding Interview which helped prepare me for interviews and such. Just the other day the author of CTCI put up some problems on HackerRank, so I figured I would give some of them a go!

What every new dev needs to know

Next up, finding the spare letter in two different strings. Check out the full problem here. Two different matching strings (s and t), where t has the one extra letter.

Hit the random button on Leetcode and ended up with a fairly easy one. I’ll put together the obvious solution and see if I can come up with something better afterwards.

This is going to be my first attempt at going through a leetcode problem on my blog. I’m starting out with an easy one to get my feet wet, So lets dive into the problem.

This is my first post on my blog! I’ll be using this blog mainly for some practice programming problems and random “tech” thoughts.