I’ve always loved learning. I’ve worked in a genetics research lab, toured as a musician, built web apps, written poetry, cooked curries, won many a game of ping pong, and earned a lifeguard certification, all driven by my love of knowledge. I’ve always had a great social life, so I never let education become more important than emotional wellbeing. But knowledge is one of my favorite parts of life. Learning and exploring makes life exciting.

I’ve thought a lot about the learning process. In teaching, there are pedagogies, which are approaches or techniques a teacher uses to help students learn…

This is a full guide to web applications for those entering the scene. This guide is for people who want a little taste of every major concept in modern web development. If you read this entire article, you’ll probably be more fluent in web development by the end. This guide assumes a basic knowledge of how the internet works. It has something for every level of software enthusiast. Wikipedia rabbit holes are encouraged. I will start with basic ideas and move to more complex concepts.

Basic software engineering concepts

Most issues in web development can be solved with basic engineering concepts. These concepts are…

Javascript is a strange, beautiful language. There’s always a new secret waiting to be discovered. Today, I was trying to replicate the private class members available in other languages, and I discovered a lot about privacy in js. I figured out a new pattern for class privacy that I haven’t seen implemented elsewhere (though I have seen similar implementations with functions).

Javascript doesn’t need class privacy

Many people use ES6 Classes because they are convenient, but remember they are syntactic sugar. Under the hood you are just creating an object, albeit one with special hooks like constructor.

Part of the beauty of javascript is that…

Web apps often need to fetch a bunch of data from an API, but not all of that data is accessible from a single endpoint. In those cases, you need to make multiple fetches in order to gather all the necessary data.

This can get messy if you need to make a large number of requests. Suppose you want to load a user’s followers on a social media app, but you are only storing the followers as a list of user ids. You have to make separate fetches to the API endpoint for each follower.

Here’s what that looks like:

…

Recently I’ve been experimenting with speech recognition in native mobile apps. React-native-voice is the easiest library for building a speech to text app in React Native. However, it can be difficult to configure the app correctly if you’re new to speech recognition or React Native. I am going to guide you through setting up a simple speech app in React Native.

1. Create a React Native app:

If you’ve never created a react native app before and have never used create-react-native-app, make sure you have node installed and run the following:

brew install watchman
npm install -g create-react-native-app
npm install -g react-native-cli

To generate a new…

Divide and conquer is an excellent technique for optimizing algorithms, whether you are trying to ace technical interviews or write efficient software. It is widely used in many algorithms including Binary Search, Merge Sort and Fast Fourier Transform.

Divide and conquer means that when you are faced with a large problem, you recursively divide it into smaller versions of the same problem. When you break up a problem in this way, the complexity often decreases exponentially, leading to O(n log n) instead of O(n) time complexity.

One simple example of divide and conquer would be finding the one unique value…

The Union find algorithm solves a huge problem in computing. In a system with many elements, where elements are connected via a path through other elements, how do we efficiently determine if two elements are connected?

This is commonly referred to as the dynamic connectivity problem. A brute force algorithm works for a system with few elements.

//brute force quick find class QuickFindUF {
// construct an array with N integer elements     constructor (N) {
        this.id = []
        for (var i = 0; i < N; i++) {
              this.id[i] = i;
         }    }// Connections between elements are tracked in…

Algorithms are the bedrock of computer programming. Algorithms are built to handle specific data structures with a range of accepted parameters. An edge case is a problem or situation that occurs only at an extreme (maximum or minimum) operating parameter. As programmers, how can we predict these cases in order to protect our app from breaking?

I will demonstrate some common edge cases in a basic bubble sort algorithm:

// bubbleSort.jsfunction bubbleSort(array) {
  var swapped;
  do {
    swapped = false;
    for(var i = 0; i < array.length; …