Diving into the caveats behind the popular ES5 array method

Introduction

Coming from a PHP background, when I first saw people utilizing .forEach() method to walk through their arrays, my nooby self thought nothing of it — it’s the same exact implementation of a standard for loop, I told myself. After writing some JavaScript code, I quickly realized that the two had their differences.

In this article, I want to outline the differences behind the standard for loop and .forEach() method as well as comment on some of the benefits that each brings to the table.

As a disclaimer, please don’t take the title literally. My goal with the article is to inform the reader of bottlenecks and provide insight as to when you may or may not want to use .forEach() — nothing more. …

A brief introduction to the notorious DDoS-for-hire services

Introduction

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are not something new to the internet. However, the medium in which people can accomplish these attacks has progressively gotten more accessible as the internet has evolved. In this article, I want to shed some light on how easy it was to orchestrate your own attacks during a specific time frame, 2012–16.

I hope it goes without saying, but please do not try to go off on your own and attempt to do your own investigating on the internet for these services. …

Diving into what VIM did and did not solve for me

Introduction

The discussion of which text editor, which shell, or which OS you use has always been a hot topic for developers to chime in on. I’m sure we all know that one person who is crazy over VIM. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but this post will not be glorifying VIM itself. Instead, this post will be used to discuss why I decided to learn VIM, what VIM solved for me, what it didn’t, and most importantly, should you learn VIM?

A brief introduction about my programming background as it will give context. I started programming seriously around late 2018 after deciding to pursue it for a career path. Before then, I would often create (pretty bad) scripts for different games I played and run a few websites/game servers as side hustles. Since taking up programming as a career, I have dabbled in several languages, but I find myself doing a lot of work in the JavaScript ecosystem. …

Taking a look at an algorithm question asked by Facebook for their front-end engineer interview

Introduction

Despite the public controversies that Facebook has had with their name, their contributions to the open-source community have been greatly utilized by the developer community. In this article, we will take a look at what kind of question you can encounter in an interview for a front-end engineer position at Facebook.

Before applying and interviewing with these companies, I highly suggest you check out the community that I am building — cscareers.dev. …

Taking a deeper look at the most frequently asked Google coding question

If one of your New Years' goals is to obtain a job at a big tech company and have no experience with answering algorithm questions, you’re in luck. If you aren’t aware of how technical interviews are conducted, you will typically be asked 1–2 algorithm-focused problems in a one-hour window, specifically 45 minutes for Google.

Before applying and interviewing with these tech companies, I highly suggest you check out the community that I am building — cscareers.dev. …

Learn the UMPIRE technique

Introduction

If you are an up-and-coming developer or a seasoned developer with multiple years of industry experience, you probably have heard or experienced first-hand how nerve-wracking technical interviews can be.

While it was true for myself initially, there were a few things that I did to help cope in these high-pressure situations.

This post and subsequent posts are to not debate whether or not the current way of interviewing is the correct way of conducting interviews for developers. I am treating it as truth and explaining some important concepts on how I played the “game” of interviewing.

In this post, I would like to shed some light on the problem-solving framework I utilized in my interviews. It is best to always have some form of structure when tackling an algorithm question. …

A practical introduction to guard clauses

When I first began programming, I wish someone would have told me about a few different concepts to think about when writing my first website.

One of the mistakes I fell into when starting was overusing the else keyword when writing conditionals. This is something that I find plenty of others doing in their own code as well, so I thought I should shed some light on the topic.

A disclaimer; my view on this topic is purely subjective.

In some situations, you may not be able to apply this type of approach to your code. Sometimes, the solution is to use the else keyword. …

Express how efficient an algorithm is without the mathematical jargon

Whenever the phrase Big O is thrown around, you might correlate it with an algorithms test that you would likely encounter at a larger tech company.

While this is true, it should not be used as a reason to completely skip over such a vital aspect of software development — how code runs.

In layman’s terms, we’ll talk about what Big O actually is, why you should care about it, and how you can go about evaluating what the Big O is for certain pieces of code.

What is Big O?

Big O is a concept that has come to be accepted in the programming world where we can express how efficient an algorithm is without having to go through the means of deriving complex mathematical expressions. …