Sign languages, such as American Sign Language (ASL), enable communication for millions of deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals worldwide. As a full-stack developer looking to apply your skills to an interesting machine learning problem, building a system to recognize sign language gestures can be a fun and rewarding weekend project. In this post, we‘ll walk through…
The stereotypical image of a software developer is the lone wolf coder, working late into the night in isolation on complex problems. However, this perception is far from the reality of how modern software is actually built. In the real world, development is a highly collaborative team effort, with programmers frequently working together to produce…
Ruby on Rails is one of the most popular web development frameworks, powering over 1 million websites worldwide including Airbnb, Shopify, and GitHub. Rails helps developers rapidly build scalable applications by emphasizing convention over configuration and providing a rich ecosystem of tools and libraries. However, even with all of Rails‘ built-in capabilities, having a productive…
As a full-stack developer, I‘ve seen firsthand how the choice of variable data types can make or break a program. Choosing the right type is critical not just for avoiding bugs, but also for writing efficient, maintainable, and scalable code. In this in-depth guide, we‘ll explore the ins and outs of variable data types across…
Sorting is a fundamental operation in programming that allows us to arrange elements in a specific order. Whether you need to display a list of names alphabetically, rank search results by relevance, or process data in a particular sequence, sorting is an essential tool. Java provides several built-in methods for sorting arrays and collections, including…
Harnessing the Power of Bits to Supercharge Your DP Code As a full-stack developer and competitive programmer, I‘m always on the lookout for ways to optimize my code and edge out the competition. One of the most powerful techniques I‘ve come across is bitmasked dynamic programming (DP). DP problems often involve exhaustively searching through a…
Memory management is a fundamental concern in software development. How your program allocates, accesses, and frees memory has major implications for performance, stability, and security. Yet many developers have only a surface-level understanding of what‘s really going on "under the hood" with memory. In this post, we‘ll take a deep technical dive into how program…
As a full-stack Ruby on Rails developer, I‘ve spent countless hours working with SQL databases. They are the bedrock of most Rails applications, providing crucial data persistence and powering the app‘s models and business logic. In this deep dive, we‘ll explore the fundamentals of SQL databases in Rails and share some hard-earned insights I‘ve gleaned…
Introduction Generics have been a core feature of Java since their introduction in Java 5, and for good reason. They provide a way to write more flexible, reusable code by allowing the creation of classes, interfaces, and methods that can work with different types while still maintaining type safety. However, generics also introduce some complex…
As a full-stack developer, you‘ll frequently find yourself working with strings in JavaScript. One common task is checking whether a string ends with a specific substring. This might come up when you‘re validating user input, processing file names, or implementing search functionality. In this comprehensive guide, we‘ll explore the two primary methods for confirming string…
As a full-stack developer, it‘s crucial to have a wide array of tools in your toolbelt for efficiently solving problems. One data structure that every developer should be familiar with is the trie, also known as a prefix tree. Tries are a tree-like data structure that excel at storing and retrieving strings efficiently. They provide…
As a full-stack developer and professional coder, I‘ve encountered my fair share of tree traversal problems. Whether it‘s inverting a binary tree, serializing a tree to JSON, or finding the lowest common ancestor of two nodes, tree traversals are a fundamental skill that comes up again and again in interviews and on the job. But…