Working from home has become much more common over the past few years, even before the COVID-19 pandemic struck. But whereas doing so was a choice before, now it is mandatory for many office workers. Working from home can be a challenge, though. Yes, it’s great to work in your pajamas and not have to shave regularly, but it comes with some pitfass as well. In this article I will share some tips I’ve picked up from having spent half of my 25 year career working from home.
Continue readingQuick Sort Algorithm
Quicksort is one of the most efficient sorting algorithm with O(log n) Big-O notation. It can be 2x – 3x faster than merge sort. It is another divide-and-conquer algorithm. The algorithm divides the list on a pivot, which can be any number in the list. Any item lower than the pivot is added to a ‘left’ list. Any item larger than the pivot is added to the ‘right’ list. The process is repeated recursively with any sub-list with more than 2 items.
Continue readingMerge Sort Aglorithm
I mentioned in yesterday’s post that a lot of data manipulation involves lists, nested and otherwise. Another common task is sorting elements in a list. Day 6 of 30 Days of Algorithms is a Merge Sort, which is another “divide-and-conquer” algorithm.
Continue readingArray to Tree Algorithm
Managing data almost always involves working with hierarchical or nested data. Whether we are talking about nested files and folders, product categories and sub-categories, music, … you name it. But we store data in a database in a flat structure. This makes sense because the data objects themselves share the same attributes and it makes for easy searching. But how we store the data and how we need to visualize and manipulate it don’t necessarily match. So how do we efficiently transform a flat array to a tree? Day 5 of 30 Days of Algorithms will present one solution with O(n) complexity.
Continue readingList Intersection / List Overlap Algorithm
Given two lists of elements, how do you find which items appear in both lists? The algorithm for Day 4 of 30 Days of Algorithms demonstrates how to find the overlap of two lists (list intersection).
Continue readingBubble Sort Algorithm
Our algorithm for Day 3 of 30 Days of Algorithms is a Bubble Sort. Bubble Sort is not an efficient sort algorithm (The Big-O notation for the time complexity is 0n2) but it is useful for learning. The basic premise is very simple : Start with the first two items in the list. If the first item (left) is higher than the second item (right), swap them.
Continue readingFind Missing Number Algorithm
The algorithm for Day 2 of 30 Days of Algorithms is a useful formula to find a missing number in an array of numbers from 1 – N. This algorithm only works if there is one-and-only-one missing number, and no duplicate numbers. There are other algorithms for those cases which I will cover on a different day.
Continue readingEuclid’s Algorithm for Greatest Common Divisor
Euclid’s algorithm finds the largest number that divides evenly into two numbers – the greatest common divisor (GCD). The Greek mathematician Euclid published the algorithm in his work, Elements in 300 BC.
Continue reading30 Days of Algorithms in JavaScript
I recently decided to re-enter the “real world” after freelancing for three years. My very first interview was at InVision. It did not go well, to say the least. The coding test focused on common algorithms in JavaScript, and I bombed. After receiving the polite rejection email, I asked the recruiter for feedback from the hiring team so I could improve.
Continue readingCreate JavaScript models from JSON
For the past several months I have been working on a new Adobe Illustrator extension to make the functionality of IconJar available as a panel. In order to manipulate the IconJar data – which is stored in JSON, I needed to create “Plain Old JavaScript Objects” (POJsO?) with getters and setters. Rather than type out the same lines of code over-and-over, I decided to create a command-line utility to quickly create the JavaScript classes for me.
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