Recurse Center Week 4: Thu Jan 25

Did a bit of a reassessment the last few days and shifted my goals somewhat:

New goals!

1. do a problem from grind 75 every day
   • sign of success: be able to do medium-level problems consistently within the recommended time limit
   • also want to read and practice all of the entries from the techinterviewhandbook algorithms cheat sheet, be able to summarize each one
2. learn a new stack: react with typescript, django, firebase, AWS
   • sign of success: contribute some significant improvement to an existing app with that stack

Connecting

• went to checkins
• officially extended to a full batch!
• took a walk with P.B.
• had a lunch chat with Alex and Sareena, discussed NYC vs. Seattle

Leetcode: Majority Element (easy)

• JS basic object implementation
  • first pass in under 20 minutes (yay!)
  • first pass was O(n) space (I think?) (6%) and O(n) time (16%) (not great)
• learned differences between JS objects and Maps:
  • from Geeks for Geeks:

1. In Object, the data-type of the key-field is restricted to integer, strings, and symbols. Whereas in Map, the key-field can be of any data-type (integer, an array, even an object!)
2. In the Map, the original order of elements is preserved. This is not true in case of objects.
3. The Map is an instance of an object but the vice-versa is not true.

• JS Map() implementation (second attempt)

  • significantly better (66%) time
  • slightly better space (8%)

• seek out even better implementations?

Went to presentations!

• 3 random takeaways:
  1. MTA API only accounts for 2 directions, which leads to some ambiguity, which mirrors my real life confusion (I can't tell you the number of times I've gone the wrong way on the G after transferring from the C at Hoyt-Schermerhorn lolol)
  2. there's a whole world of local-first apps, seems cool: localfirstweb.dev
  3. TypeScript playground: a place to explore differences in transcompilation into different versions of JS