Hey, folks, welcome back to another episode of JavaScript Jabber. This week on our panel, I guess it's just me Charles max Wood. We have a two special guests. We have totally and you've been on before. You want to remind people who you are?
Sure? So, I'm a front end engineer. I think the last I might have done two episodes. One of them was about developer happiness and the other was about pickle JS, which is an integration test in my braid that I read awesome.
We also have Jeff. Jeff, do you want to introduce yourself? I don't know who you've been on before.
No, I haven't been on. I'm actually on a back end engineer in SRI. Yeah, my first time.
Here is okay, now, are you a back end engineer or SRE on like note stuff or not recently?
Okay, you're back in thence node but yeah, just uh more more of it's been my Python and go.
Right m fun stuff. We also had Steve Edwards join us, So welcome Steve.
How you doing? How you doing?
All right? Well, we're gonna we're gonna get rolling.
We okay, good, Yeah.
We're live.
Now MEMORYX We're live. Baby.
That's right, So really quickly we brought you guys on to talk about the leak code meet up that you guys do.
I guess it's in New York City.
And I was looking at the website and it says that this so, so I guess we should probably start with what it is, but I want to get the story because it looks.
Like you totally bothed.
A both that kind of got things started.
Yeah, So somewhere around March, I got fired from drop Box and I started looking for jobs. And unlike all these prior years I've been a software engineer for about thirteen years, front end engineers never really had to do leak code. We just had a little take home exercise or my Cota React opponent. And I started applying for jobs, and all of a sudden, there's just all these lead code questions. So I want on a few interviews, just completely vomiting. And I started studying for lead code at
that point and it was just so arduous, so boring. Yeah,
I was making no progress whatsoever. So I went on this tech forum called blind, which is basically where big tech people hang out, and I posted like, hey, you know, I'm looking for some lead code Buddies in New York City, and I had some overwhelming response, over one hundred comments to that post saying like, hey, you know, I'm interested, And from that, I just started a discord group to get everybody organized and we had our first meetup, which was probably about thirty people.
Cool.
So I have to admit I'm kind of in the same boat that you were talking about not necessarily seeing leak code questions come up, but I've never done anything in it.
So what is leak code?
Yeah, so basically it's algorithm data science questions, something that you would learn in computer science and college, and for the most part, it doesn't really come up in most engineers' lives on their day to day job, certainly not a front end engineers. But why do companies ask these kinds of questions? Because they do. And at first I just didn't really get it, like it seemed, you know, lazy and counterintuitive, But then I started to understand why.
Ultimately they receive hundreds of applications for each position and they need some way to filter those candidates because they all come from good companies. Now they can say whatever they want on their resume, but ultimately, what leap code does is It gives a somewhat quantitative measure of can you at least use logic to solve a problem? And as I started doing more leap code, I started seeing like, okay, okay, I could see how you know, it links back to
general problem solving, ability, communication skills, et cetera. I still don't like it, but I could see why it's useful.
Yeah, I'm with you.
I mean, I've done where I'm at in my company, been in charge of doing some hiring for hiring a number of developers, and we.
It's sort of a two edge sword.
And as in that as a developer, it's an applicant.
I hate them. I hate them.
They've cost me jobs before, you know, And unfortunately in the case, it was my issue was that it was so different doing it the way you do it during an application process, during an interview, versus how you would do.
It in real life.
You know.
So, for instance, you know, if I'm programming view or Lara Belle, some of the other tools I've got my ide I've got a debugger set up, I've got you know, I'm at for tools that I can use to help me work through a problem. Where if I'm doing a test online. In this case, it was like a task pad type of thing where somebody's sitting there watching.
Me and m coding.
I have no debugger, I've got nothing to help me that I don't normally have, and it's like, how is this applicable? You know, But at the same time, coming in front, coming at it from the other side, we
use a different platform. We didn't use leak code. My boss had looked at lead code and we had gone with another one where we come up with our own tests and they have a pool of questions a week and assign them and we would use that and we have a minimum score, you know that they had to have nothing really high, but it would filter out a decent amount of people and then the ones that we've hired did really well on it.
So there's pros and cons.
I guess it just depends on what side of the equation you're on when you're when you're having to use this, it's I don't think it. You can certainly get people who could pass the tests and then don't do well. One thing we ran into this is so funny, was one of the things that the platform that we used. I think it's test dont tells you how long it took him to pass the test. And we looked at one guy and it was like, you know, thirty seconds.
We're like.
Okay, So we start hunting around and sure enough, you can find us on GitHub with the answers to test from this to this particular question from this particular platform. And so it's literally copy and paste. Now, if I was to do that, I would still type it in manually to take up the appropriate amount of times just copy paste, but this guy decided to, uh yeah, just copy paste and got.
It that way. So anyway, sorry, my two cents there on on what you were just talking about.
Yeah, before you respond to what Steve's talking about, Jeff, what how did you get involved in all this?
Yeah? So yeah, I mean I maybe as a back end dev. I have done leek code problems earlier on in my career, but for interviews. But I do feel like it's shifted a little bit too, where you know, originally you could kind of see, okay, if you had sort of undergraduate level algorithms and data structures, you kind of just needed to know that stuff, and it was like a gate for that. But because there's more and more applicants and there's more and more of a need
to filter. They've just they've just constrained the time that you have and you have to sort of do slightly
more convoluted problems. It's still the same data structures, but more convluted, less time, more convluted, less time, and so it's just become this, yeah, this very time constrained performance you have to do where you really have to be fast and actually to your point, like I feel like you actually have to code a little differently because there really isn't time and in like an hour in some cases, you know, twenty minutes you have to solve some of these and so like you really have to you can't
afford to need to debug your code. Really you have to be able to just have your answer be mostly right the first time you write it, which is so different from the normal process of how I would actually work, where you like you re write it, or you write it, you write an initial version, you kind of think through it. Oftentimes the first version I write of something is is just a it's just like a rough draft and like I'll rewrite it. That's like part of the process. But
I feel like in some of these interviews. Yeah, you have to approach it differently because there isn't time for you to fit in and rewrite in the middle of it. So it's just a very different it's a very different approach to just coding in general. I feel like, and I don't know, I guess I kind of take the respect of like, well, I'm gonna have to do these It's like every field has their arbitrary gatekeeping that they do. If you're like a doctor, you're there's like almost hazing
that people have to put up with, so like enter that. Yeah, Yeah, our own form of hazing sort of arise. Is like they've just made these problems like arbitrarily more difficult because they just need to filter people basically.
So yeah, yeah, So did.
Jeff, I'm curious, did you see the I'm gonna kind of ask it a different way.
So did you see Totally's post? Is that how you got involved in the group?
Yeah? Or so, I'm I'm somewhat new to New York. I moved here on January and I was kind of looking for I was both sort of looking for starting to you know, have my eyes up for new work out here, and then also just wanted to meet people.
So I went on meetup dot com and so totally had kind of put it on all the platforms and so that was that was the way I got in is saw it on meetup and then started attending, and yeah, I met a bunch of like very people who are really willing to grind I guess, you know, like willing to just like come in and do the just come in every week, do the work, which is like, I, yeah,
I agree, it's sort of not fun work. But it's like I realized, like I'm going to get more and more of these as things as time goes on, so yeah, I gotta get good at it. So yeah, it's good.
So so yeah, so going back to the original discussion, Yeah I can.
I don't know.
I've I've been given all kinds of sample problems, you know, for interviews, and.
Some of them are helpful and some of them are not.
But yeah, it sounds like the platform is a little bit hard to work with because I've always just been able to do it with my own ide I.
Guess there's like a few things that are hard to work with, not just missing an ID, but the whole style, Like, yeah, you don't get to use a debugger. You know, you don't get to use a lot of the tools that you usually have out there. You don't really get the whole type script support in most of these platforms, so you know, you don't know the data structure without manually having to analyze what's going on. The time constraint. It's
not doing you any favor. It's rated for speed, not for readability, which I think is my main problem with this kind of style of coding. Usually as an engineer, I want to make sure that everybody is going to understand my work, So I'm going to use very descriptive variable names. I'm going to split it up into different functions, probably different files. But that's just not really a luxury
that you get in weak code. People use like one letter of variable names, and you know there's the whole like code golf, where you try to write everything on one line, like all sorts of different like hacks and cheets together like a few milliseconds. It's just solving a very different kind of problem than I'm used to.
Well, you know one thing that I've noticed before, and you hear this joke I heard on you know, whether it's syntax FM or any other podcast. Some people will say, you know, twitch streaming is sort of a popular thing, you know, where coders will get on and live stream and other people can watch them. And I heard one guy say, yeah, the reason I don't do that is they might see that, you know, seventy five percent of the time, I'm googling how do I do this in PHP?
Or how do I do this in JavaScript?
You know, just like you know, you know, I come up, I start coming up with a little shortcuts from my forget my little online tool here in like Alfred, you know that, you know, look up this in PHP real quick, or you know, look at this, and I'm not always typing everything. And just because that's how your member stuff is, how you look up stuff, you know, you got to look for it half the time instead of just being able to do it from memory right away.
Yeah, I agree. It's I feel like one of the biggest complaints about it is it's it's becomes less and less about like creative problem solving or like like diffuse mode thinking, where you know your your your brains are more of the diffuse mode where you're you're accessing different
parts of your brain. You really have to turn turn your your coding into like a fast twitch thinking, like kind of focus mode where you're not you're not you're not doing as much creative problem solving as much as just executing unknown patterns and you have to like know the patterns, memorize the patterns, and then just rip them out real fast without making mistakes. And it kind of yeah,
it's sort of is a difference. I feel like the interviews are are searching for different qualities in people because of that, it's like much more about, uh, I don't know, being like a code soldier, you know that just sort of executes on the patterns that are in front of you, versus like a creative problem solver. But yeah, especially as like I have ADHD too, so it's like, not, that's not the kind of things that I naturally excel at.
So I feel like I have to put in more time than a normal person would and like in those types of interviews.
But yeah, what do you know?
What do you It was a discussion about standardized testing in schools, where you get to the point where the standardized test scores are so important for you know, getting money for schools or whatever, that pretty soon teachers are teaching for the test instead of the content and teaching how to creatively think, how to problem solve. You know, insteady are teaching, Okay, the test is looking for this or we're going to teach everything so that you can
pass this test. Okay, great, you get past the test. What has that done for you? You know, how to pass that test, But has it taught you anything really useful outside of that?
But yeah, I'm kind of curious.
Does your group do some of that where it's more strategies to pass the leak codes as opposed to you know, specific I don't know, algorithms or something a little.
Bit yeah, I mean it will like for specific types of problems, but it's like strategies to move quickly within.
That's what I mean. It's so, yeah, I start teaching to the tests, so to speak a little bit.
Right, And so it's like, okay, so you know the types of problems where you have like a two D matrix and you need to do breath re search on cells in the matrix or something. Then like you know, there's like little like a generator Like a lot of us have taken to just writing this little generator function that just checks to see if the neighbors are on the edge or not, and then like that's the pattern
we use every time we do that. Now is just this little and it's just like it's a it is useful to kind of learn those little subcoding patterns to like be able to like rip those answers out really fast. But but yeah, it's like little micro strategies to avoid getting tripped up in the implementation during an interview and just being able to like bang out, bang out like code like that basically have mentally saved code snippets of
things that you can just bang out. Honestly, yeah, it would be nice to have those saved in an editor where you could just like put the snippet in. But yeah, I mean.
I've got to say, though, you know, as much as I want to take that moral high ground of well this has nothing to do with our jobs, I am
starting to get a bit more appreciation. So I actually interviewed for a few jobs and I failed on the practical coding skills, which well no excuse there really, and the reason being the last two years I actually probably coded thirty percent of the time, and what I coded was pocs and the rest of the time I was basically project management and architecture, and I completely forgot like how do you code a basic component and react? You know,
like that that is something I should know. And then I started, you know, working on my own like little app just for fun, and I realized like, huh, like I really should know these different patterns, but like I don't, and I start like going through and it feels very much like leap code, where Okay, I kind of see like these common patterns, like when I'm dealing with inputs, this is generally the code that I would use if I'm trying to like pass in filters. How do I
pass in filters? How do I pass them back? It's like a pretty common problem, but you kind of have to think through it a little bit the first time, and then you know the pattern. So is it exactly the same kind of problems that I'll be solving. No, but believe it or not, I think this strategy's sort of started helping me in the part of coding which I do value for my job.
Yeah, just more proof of the addedy use it or lose it.
Right yep.
So I'm a little curious then, since this was focused on I guess mastering leak codes so you could get a job.
Did help you get a job?
Not yet. I actually took a break from lead code and job searching for about I want to say, two months, probably something like that, and yeah, a lot of it. I realized I have some savings and right now it's just not a great market for engineers. My biggest problem at work has always been, you know, a lack of a personal life, lack of community. Like all my self worth was pretty much invested in my job, and that
caused a whole bunch of different problems. So I basically decided to take a few months to like build up you know, some community, build up some friends, some hobbies, and now I'm like sort of passively searching. Like I've got an interview with Uber, Airbnb, and Stripe.
Coming up, the small companies on them all and pop shops.
Yeah yeah, but yeah, like I think at this point, you know, I'm more in passive search mode because I rather, you know, have that really stable personal base for when I go back to work.
And you know, I think a lot of that blind culture is like you have to have a job now, you have to maximize your TC and that's not necessarily.
The only path your TC.
Oh, so blind, How did you describe Blind? Jeff?
Yeah, in my opinion, blind's kind of a toxic environment. But TC just means total compensation, and it's yeah, it's very like a lot of the people on Blind are all big tech workers. I mean that's sort of the intention of it is. It's like you get the inside scoop on some of these companies I guess as people anonymously joined Blind and then talk about the company. But it's sort of become this, yeah, this culture of like everyone's obsessed with the fang income and basically it's Yeah.
So.
I don't know if I always feel like Blind is the healthiest place to go on a little bit of like a I mean, I'm sure there's like I don't you never really know how many people are lying about what their TC is or what they're doing. But yeah, it's a pretty like just compensation obsessed getting the highest paing job no matter what kind of thing. But and then also just like very negative about the industry in general. But it's very like kind of nihilistic kind of culture. Yep,
like everything sucks. Money is the only thing that matters. But I don't know, I mean, like it's still is useful in some ways to like just get yeah, get some of that information a little bit if you're willing to wade through kind of the toxicity that is common with all of social media at this point.
But but yeah, yeah, so and like yeah, I think like that is sort of there is a little bit of an aspect of that with like lead code is associated most with like the fang or like the big company type interviews, and so there is always going.
To be like a portion of the population of people who are interested in granting leak code that are a little bit more just the sort of TC TC monsters or whatever. But I don't know, I feel like, yeah, emotionally it's hard to like sustain that attitude about life. So like I feel like for me and that I think for totally as well. It's like it's like you eventually want it to become like a game or that you start to get good, Like it's it's like a
workout or something. You start to like value the improvement or the progress that you're making, and it's sort of a game that you're getting better at, like like your crosswords or something, right word, And I don't know, i'd try to cultivate that attitude about it a little bit
because it is a grind. But I like, I think, like totally said, I'm starting to sort of enjoy the problems a little bit, Like spend a little bit of time each day where I sit down with a fresh cup of coffee in the morning and just like work on one of the problems. And yeah, you try and be forgiving of yourself if you aren't getting that one
right then, and yeah, just try to be organized. If you realize you're struggling with something, like write down what it is so you can kind of start to identify patterns and like what you're good at, what you're not
good at. Like I'm a big fan of deliberate practice, that that whole concept you just like break down all the components of your implementation and your like algorithm you're problem solving like steps and then just are to identify like where you're strong, where you're weak, and then drill all the things. And I don't know, like in a way it's like I can recognize it's all it's all sort of bs. But in another way, I'm sort of enjoying the progress that I'm making. So it's not like
I'm not totally nihilistic about it. I guess yeah, actually.
Funny, what what is TC monster? I missed that, like just.
Somebody who it's like just being obsessed with compensation and nothing else.
Compensation aging, Yeah.
Because yeah, once you get to the like certain thing, like they compensate more and more in terms of stock, so like they always talking to TC versus just salary. Because yeah, like as you as you go to get to Fang, it's it'll be like more than half of your compill start to come from from like stock and stuff.
So what were you going to say?
Totally Yeah, So interesting thing happened. I took a break from leak code for about two months, and after that I went back to a leak code problem and it became so much easier. And I noticed that I didn't really have that whole stressful mindset when approaching the problem. It was more like, all right, if I solve it, great, if I don't solve it whatever, And like once all those like voices just started moving away. It really is
about problem solving. You just kind of lay out a plan and you follow that plan versus I think that blind does have that sort of hectic culture of like, I've got to solve these problems. It has to happen right now. If I'm unemployed for one more month, it's going to be terrible. So I think, you know, even for people in big tech on blind, it would be really useful to step away from that kind of culture for a bit and then come back.
I kind of have two directions I want to go. I guess we're still talking about leak code. Let's do this one first, and it is effectively like what strategies are there like it. So let's say somebody is listening to this and they're going, Okay, you've talked about this leak code meet up and how these guys got together, But how do I solve the leak codes?
Right?
How do I get better at them?
Speak a little bit to it, I guess. I mean, I think like one thing that's important is like, even if you're familiar with algorithms or data and data structures, maybe you have like a CS degree or something, that doesn't mean you're familiar with like all the intricacies of
the different ways to implement that algorithm. It's like binary search, for instance, there's like I think a lot of people are comfortable with binary search, maybe even to the point of being like, oh, this is really basic, Like I shouldn't have to drill on this. But it's different to
implement binary search. For instance, if you're looking for a specific element in an array versus you're looking for a boundary point between, like where you would insert an element that doesn't yet exist in an array, and there's like slightly different ways to do that, and like, depending on some of the more complicatedly code problems may involve something where you're looking for a position in a sort of array that isn't an element, but you need to like
find that position and then do something, or another one is where you need to search for an element, and they both have slightly different ways that you implement the wile loop, and like they both start with like a left pointer and a right pointer, and one of them may be like less than an equal to or you wait until they're basically overlapping, and the other one it
will be less than or something. So there's slightly different implementations depending on which flavor of binary search you're trying
to do. And I think like the process of trying to get good at it is sort of identifying, like oh, Okay, so this is probably going to be this type of algorithm, but then there's like four different ways implemented, and I should drill on all of those so that way, like you're not getting tripped up in that part of the implementation as you're trying to bang out the algorithm that maybe like that and then a few other steps or something, or like another example is like I was actually just
sort of realizing I needed to work on this the other day. It was like I've done a lot of breath for search or depth for search problems, and not a lot of like multi source breath for search or death for a search, where you like you don't just start from one point and then search outwards, but you put like several points in there at once and then you look at like layers and then that could like so just as an example, if you well, I don't know if we want to dive into a whole problem,
I guess, but like there's there's differently like there's little in implementation flavorings of every algorithm, and just like being patient with yourself, like trying some problems and then you're inevitably not going to get all of them, but like try and rack your brain to get something working, and then after a while and once you realize you're not
making any progress, Like check the editorial. I really recommend paying for leak code Pro so you can see their editorials because they do a really good job of breaking down how to solve the problem. And then and then kind of identify like, oh, okay, so like I was able to identify that yeah, breath first search was the right algorithm here, but I got tripped up in this
part of the implementation. And then just try to like I keep a lot of notes off to the side of like this type of problem, like multi So I've started like taking notes a bunch about like multi source bfs, and I put that off to the side, and I put some of the problems that were related in the related section and then have the stored off to those sides so I can drill them. And it's a lot of like yeah, I just like like understanding the little
nuances and then just sticking with it. And I honestly think that's like one of the best benefits of the group is that like it's a grind, and it's like it's better to like suffer with other people. I guess company, right, It's like it becomes like a little bit of a social outlet. It's not so isolating and like we kind of are going through it together and teaching each other
and that kind of thing. So it becomes a lot less like this like despair of all this work that you have to do and how hard it is and all of that, and more about like us helping each other.
So yeah, at risk, at risk.
It's sounding like the stereotype that everybody says about crossfitters. That's part of the reason I love CrossFit is that you're sharing the misery with other people and it makes the heck a lot better than when you're just in there, you know, working out by yourself in a home gym or doing your own workout at a standard gym. It just makes it so much more enjoyable. And who knows, you're gonna learn from other people as well.
Yeah, totally.
You see them walking in like they're busted the same way you're busted.
Oh yeah.
Oh, there's so many good memes on Instagram about like that. That CrossFit is so funny.
So I got another question, and that is more along the lines of the meetup. So it's so funny because COVID totally screwed up meetups, and I mean there used to be a whole bunch of tech meetups here in Utah. I think there are a couple that have kind of come back, and by comeback, I mean they're running.
I don't know how many people are going.
It's like one third the attendance that most of them have.
That right, So my question is, so let's say that I want to start a meetup, not necessarily even a leak code meetup, but let's say that I'm thinking, Okay, you know, it'd be really great. There's all this new stuff coming down with AI or with you know, maybe it is leak code, or maybe it's just hey, look, you know, I want to be better at JavaScript or better react or you know, you name it. What what do you recommend for people who want to get something like that started.
I think a lot of it is there has to be a real need. The reason why leak could worked was it kind of needed to get a job. We were targeting people who really wanted jobs. So I think if you find that then it's relatively straightforward. But yeah, like I think the second one, I also started another kind of community and a lot of that has to do with identity, like how do you identify yourself? Yes, if you can link to identity, that does a lot.
Right now, is that is that partially just hey I do react, or hey I do view or I want to do better JavaScript? Or is there more identity than that that you want to dive into.
Well, for the other community I sort of started, it has absolutely nothing to do with computers, but well, let's say part of it is something about like how do I communicate with the world? How am I honest with myself? So if you start seeing yourself as a certain type of person when you say I am blank, then it's much easier to form community of people around you that
are dedicated to that costs. And I think that does have in leak code because people identify as like I am someone who works in big tech, I am someone who gets the leaked code, So it works. Ultimately, the more close you are to somebody's identity.
The better gotcha. You know.
I haven't delved into leak code just yet, although side note, I was just talking to a buddy of mine that's a DevRel at Amazon, and he was telling me about their process and leak code and He was like, yeah, you probably want to go study up and get like the premium membership and do everything you can for three or four weeks before you can try How does it work from a language standpoint? Do you get to choose the languages that you're using to answer these questions?
Is it like, you know, like if.
You primarily view or you know, one of the JOBASCRIPT frameworks is like Vanilla JavaScript, do you get you stuff in view? Or if you're a back end guy like PHP or job or a node or Ruby, do you get to use the language of your choice frand sharing questions?
How does that work?
You do? I would say, like we could kind of start it out as like mostly Java in Python, but since then they've really put a lot of effort into expanding. So most of the editorials now are in a bunch of different languages. I think they they have C plus plus and Java and Python, and they usually have a JavaScript the editor. You can do a lot of different languages, like typescript. If you want to do that, you can
do JavaScript. They're actually maybe I'll hop over and fire it up really quick and just confirm, But yeah, there's a bunch of different languages that they support, and like most of the editorials have a bunch of languages as well. But every once in a while you may see a problem that like in the actual examples of how it solved in the editorials, like it'll only be two languages or something. But we've had a number of people that have attended the group that are coming from Gooding boot Cam's.
It's actually the two places where we meet up is that one of two different cutting bood camps, And a lot of those folks have JavaScript as their main language.
So like, I think JavaScript works just fine. I think like Python is like is what I recommend if people are sort of agnostic to language, just because it gives you again in terms of speed, Python has a lot of these little helper functions that just like you take a list and then you call sorted on it and now it's sorted, or like you call max on it and you get the maximum elements and it's just like you just like throw that function on there and then just keep going and it just there's a lot less
stuff that you have to implement yourself. But but yes, you can do any language for the most part and actually have the editor open. Okay, so they have c plus plus, Java, Python, Python three, so Python two, Python three, c she sharp, javascriptpescript, Php, Swift, Cotlan, dark Go, Ruby, Scala, Rust, racket erline, analyxir. Is that all that's everything, that's what
the editor supports. Yeah, Like so yeah, and I think like I think if if you're thinking jobscript, I think that has is going to have like pretty it's I would say, it's like a first class citizen at this point of we code. So like a lot of the edit editorials have job script implementations. So and it looks like typescript as well.
So but why is it called an editorial, right? I guess newspapers, I guess like.
They have a like there's there's like a solutions section, but that that I think was what they first implemented, and that's just like community solutions, and then the editorial is like a professionally done breakdown that like really describes the whole algorithm with like with diagrams and you know, even like maybe a litle bit of video or something. So like the solutions, I think I'm guessing it's like a legacy thing. It's like they called the the solutions
was the name they gave the community solutions. I guess.
So maybe maybe they were looking at the community stuff and like pulling out and saying, Okay, from all of what people are saying. As an editor of this content, this is these are the important pieces for people who were commonly missed concepts or whatever.
That would make sense. Yeah, I guess. I don't know for sure that that was their thought process, but that would make sense.
I personally don't find the editorials that useful. Whenever I want to understand something, I go to YouTube, I type the problem, and there's much much better visual explanations.
Oh so people are doing videos on specific leak code questions and how to answer them and solve them.
Okay.
Also, there's a guy called neat Code who I think is one of the top YouTubers that he has a course essentially explaining all these concepts in visual ways, and they all do a much better job than the editorials in my opinion.
Yeah, I agree. I also think like nea code is is if you're either new to algorithms or end data structures, or you're just kind of rusty, start with net code. That's another like paid thing though, but it's like it's like one hundred bucks for a year and then you go through their like his intro to algorithms, and it gives a bunch of tutorials and then links to specific weak code problems that are for those topics. And I think that is one of the better sort of on
ramps into sort of weak code. And that's spelled n ee T code dot io. I guess we're we're basically advertising for that at this point. But yeah, I mean I do think like we've had a couple of people that come into the to the sessions that are, you know, pretty new, and we always recommend, like I always recommend new code as like, hey, this is how this is how you kind of un ramp.
So totally.
You had mentioned a little earlier about how you did this for a while and then you went away and then you came back. It's like, oh now I can understand it, which is so true. I mean, how many I can't count the number of times I've solved the problem in my head in the shower, you know, because I'm sitting there thinking about it or having a nightmare. Oh yeah, that's how I should do it.
I get really stuck.
I go for a walk, yeah exactly.
My question is, you know, we were talking earlier about how this can sort of be like studying for the test instead of studying the material.
I'm curious to see that after.
Having studied for leak code and gone through this and studying these problems.
What areas you felt it improved for you? If any?
I mean, does it help you with just general problem solving, with maybe some you know, programming type problem solving. What is it that, if anything, that you feel you can do better having gone through and studied for leap code.
Well, when I first started, I had so much emotional attachment, for lack of a better word, to leap code. You know, On one hand, it was I really hate doing this. This is so boring, this is so useless. I don't want to do this, Like I can't do this, Like I'm not the type of person who can do this. I'm a JavaScript engineer, I'm not like an algorithm's person. Just a whole laundry list of why I don't want to
and can't do leap code. After starting the meetup up a little bit, you know, I started improving and seeing like, all right, so if I practiced this now I could get better. You know, I actually passed some first rounds of interviews which I did not think I would pass. Like in Meta, I passed like two out of three
algorithm interviews, which I was very surprised at. And then like taking that big break, it probably did I wouldn't say the most good, but it did a huge chunk of good for me because it removed a lot of that I have to solve this or my life is sorry.
With any friendly podcast.
Yeah. Yeah, So basically that's what it did for me. And also just where I traveled. I went to Europe for a little while, and a lot of people who I met were nomads, so all they did was essentially travel the world and they you know, went to different akaryoga conventions and a lot of people there they earned like maybe ten fifteen thousand dollars a year and they
were just having this much more fulfilling lifestyle. And then you have people on blind you know, making five hundred seven hundred k year and they're suicidal, they don't have relationships. So having that huge juxtaposition of these two different lifestyles, it really helped me let go of a lot of the emotional baggage around lead code. And then it's like this is just like any other problem, like it's not special, Like it removed that special factor from it.
So it sounded like it wasn't emotional attachment you had. It was more like emotional repulsion.
Yeah. Yeah, I really don't want to do that exactly.
So how does that?
You know?
Going back to your meetups? So what do you do with the meetups?
I mean, is it is it like do you have like a shared screen where somebody can share their screen and everybody can look at a problem and sort of work through how to do it? Do you just pair up and look at laptops? Is is there any sort of structure like Okay, how you doing We're going to talk about this and this where you go through problems as a group.
Does it vary? I'm just curious to see how that works.
It does vary.
I would say it varies a little bit based on how many people show up to a specific one. So like we have one two like two weeks ago on Thursday at general Assembly, and that one was very large, so there's like sixty people there, so we really had to break it up into smaller groups. And in that case, we broke it up by just like level and the code like easy, medium, hard and then there was like
a system design group. In that case, I think we may actually start to incorporate, like for the really large groups, start to incorporate like a pret easy group as well, because there's a few people who are just onboarding onto the code and we want to include those people, I think in the and when we're when they're smaller groups like some of our Saturday sessions. We I guess the pattern that we've fallen into that we sort of like
is that we do we pick a solution type. It's like sliding window, where you like slide a window across an array to compute something and sort of will make a theme for the whole session around finding like identifying problems of that solution type and then solving a number of them to sort of get familiar with that type of solution, And that I think helps a lot with just sort of like taking one one type of solution and kind of embedding it in your mind so it
becomes like a tool, like a tool in your toolkit that you can pull out if you see another type
of problem that uses that. And that's I think if you're starting to get into leak code too, Like I think the thing that can make it a lot less intimidating is realizing that there's only like like there's like only like twenty five total types of solutions really for all leak code problems, more or less, and they're all like like every leak code problem is like a different variation on a solution type or maybe combines two of
them together or something. But there's only like twenty five patterns, and then you just have to kind of like drill them all and there's like different flavors of the given pattern, Like binary searches a pattern, but there's different flavors of it.
But this actually brings up something that I've been thinking about a lot lately, especially with this explosion of AI.
It seems like we're wasting billions of dollars on these you know, general problems solvedving word games when really, because I was thinking, I was thinking'd be more in the order of ten thousand, like maybe less than that, but somewhere in the order of ten thousand things you do as a programmer, like think of every for loop you've ever written, Think of every set of if statements you've ever done, you know, think of every algorithm that you'd ever had to ever have had to use, which is
probably less than twenty five you know, outside of leekode. Like, think of all those things if you just had some sort of assistant that could help identify like, ah, this is the pattern here, let me template this out. How much more valuable would that be than having some generic thing that's just trying to like guess and figure stuff out from you know, context clues and statistical analysis, And how much less expensive would be in processing power?
Yeah, are you talking about like designing an AI like as a design for a coding assistance or.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because because the whole idea of of most of this stuff seems to be based on open AI's work, whether it's open ai or not. Like the LM technology that they made public before they went back to being a private company or not went back
but became a private company. You know, like like that that vein of technology is so good for what it was designed for, like creating ads right like you want to you want to put lots of ads on web pages with lots of keywords without you know that like that's that is the business model that that open ai had for like the last ten years until you know,
two years ago they started doing code and stuff. But yeah, so if and it's like they took a really really general like word driven approach and then applied to programming
and it does amazingly well. Like I I actually am now a paid subscriber for GPT four oh because with four oh, it's good enough that it's like gone from solving the problems I ask it, like, you know, a quarter of the time to seventy five percent of time, and some of that is I only ask it questions in a certain way now, but four oh is definitely better than three you know when when this thing started.
But I just think so often if it could just temple it out, like what are the things that you do as a programmer, because there's not that many things that you really do. It's you do like you're saying, you take there's I think it's more than twenty five different patterns, but you know it's accountable number of patterns
that you use as a programmer. What if you just created an AI that did those things and then templated them them out rather than what you know, the statistical analysis bit that that's kind of the the the thought experiment.
I think CHET CHIPTI already can do a lot of that. I mean, I use chet GPT for all my coding. Now. Yeah, basically, I describe the problem that I'm trying to solve and it spits out a good like one hundred one hundred and fifty lines of code. Anything past that, that's where it starts having problems. It can't understand the context of my whole app. But if I say, like this is something very specific that I want this module to do,
it does an incredible job. And there are many like little things that it's great at as well, like you know, create a type map for what I'm trying to do. Like that's just something that takes a long time to do by hand. But yeah, yeah it'll get it like ninety nine percent of the time.
I definitely don't see ninety nine percent, but it's with Furrow. I think that it's above fifty percent.
For just like a bunch of Jason, Like say I drop in a bunch of adjacent and it has like some text in it. I've basically never had it guess incorrectly, and I might have to change it around, like maybe like for this proper pretty instead of a string, it's this array of strings but that's really the only time that it gets it wrong, and you can't expect it to get it right. There.
I was asking about how the meetup runs, and I think somebody mentioned that you guys do it at General Assembly in New York, So how do you find the space for your meet up?
Somebody worked there or.
The Yeah, I mean, so that was actually Ken's not here, but Ken and Stephen putting a lot of work into just reaching out to different coding boot camps and those have been the most successful. So there's one called Fractal there in like Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and then there's General Assembly, which is more in midtown Manhattan, and the General Assembly is more new Fractal we meet on Saturdays, and General assemblies like every other Thursday now or it's going to be.
But yeah, I mean, there have been a number of different attempts to reach out. I think in the early stages, Totally was actually covering the cost of like trying to pay for these paid venues, and that wasn't super sustainable because we just have fluctuating numbers of people attending, and like it was also optional to pay for tickets, So at that time a lot of people opted not to and it was just wasn't really sustainable to do the
paid venues. So but yeah, we've found that those the coding boot camps are definitely happy to have us there because it's like an interview prep group, which is sort of directly related to the value they're trying to provide their students. So that's gone, that's gone well so far, and we basically just get to use their space. For Fractal, we just get to kind of show up on Saturdays and use their space and then for GA they have to like organize an event around it because that's sort
of their policy. But yeah, we're still kind of exploring a bit. I think Fractals like a further out, it's a less central location, so not as many people can attend that one. So yeah, we're always well, well, yeah, looking for a space that's going to be kind of central for people that is hopefully not expensive.
So speaking of space, do you ever use MySpace? I'm not kidding.
I just saw an article about MySpace celebrating its twenty first anniversary, so I brought that to mind.
I'll give myself a rimshot for this.
Wait is Mike, I'm going to go to the website didn't. I didn't know they were still around.
Yeah, here's an article, I'll mention it and picks that I have something I just on Hacker news.
So anyway, cool? Is there anything else we want to shoot?
Dog?
It does exist?
Anything else we want to go into with the meetup or leak code before we do picks? Okay, well let's do the picks. Then we usually have our guests go last. But Jeff, if you've got to jump off soon, are you enjoying any TV shows, books, movie, these, technology?
Anything else?
Uh? I don't know.
This is this is not super anything.
Started playing Cyberpunk again, but but that's a that's an older game. I guess. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, just I have nothing that's super exciting. It's like I've just played Cyberpunk and ballers Gate three and then I do Bartarya when I'm not not working and looking for work. It's hard to come up with these on the spot. Come back to me and I'll maybe have something.
All right, Hopefully you don't get your call between now and then, aj do you want to start us off with the picks?
Then?
Yes, I do, Chuck, so one thing that I totally forgot last time. So my wife and I took a trip to to Colorado to see the Royal Gorge Bridge, and on the way we finally started listening to some of the Brandon Sanderson Secret Project books that we've had now for I guess about two years, but have not like listened taken the opportunity to enjoy listening to this.
On the trip we did, and we listened to You Me and the Nightmare Painter and Sunlit Man, and she I think had already listened to Tress and I was in the last few chapters of The Frugal Wizard's Guide to Medieval England, and You Me and the Nightmare Painter is just an amazing story. I think that it is one of Brandon Sanderson's best works. It very much has an anime feel to it. He says that it was inspired by Final Fantasy X and a manga and then just you know, some of his own thoughts while sitting
on the bus or in the park or something. But it is it's a world in which there are nightmare painters, and nightmare painters go out at at night and they're basically like cops, like not like cops, they're like like citizen did what did you call that back in the nineties with the signs up in the neighbor neighborhood Watch, they're like neighborhood watch, like paid neighborhood watch, except that they are watching out for nightmares, which are creatures that
uh come out at at at night and become manifest from people's dreams. So very very much in that vein of you know, like Spirited Away or something that seems like a studio ghibli type of story, and you know that that in of itself may not appeal to you, but I like, yeah, I'd almost rather just give someone the book and say here, read this or listen to this, then try to describe it. But but I'll try to
describe it anyway. So there's the nightmare Painters, and then there is you me, who I don't think that she's called a princess, but essentially she's a she's not a princess, she's a type of royalty. And then it kind of goes into a Freaky Friday scenario. So yes, it's like it's like Spirited Away meets Freaky Friday. That is what
you mean the Nightmare Painter is. But there's also I don't know, I mean calling it that just makes it sound so not as great as it is, because Spreaky Friday is an okay movie and Spirited Away is a very weird cartoon. But You Me and the Nightmare Painter is just awesome. I loved it. I think it was around twelve hours long, and we listened to it on one point five and one setting on our trip out to the hotel, and then other quick picks the chosen. I think that season four is has been phenomenal. I
think it's really interesting as as a fairly well. It's a non denominational portraying of the of Jesus' disciples. So there's a little bit of Catholicism in there, there's a little bit of Judaism in there, there's a little bit of Evangelists Christianity in there. There's a bit of the Church of jes Christ to the Latter day Saints in there.
There's like, there's lots of different philosophies represented, not I think because the intent was to represent the different philosophies or different religions, but more because I think this person just has a really good reading of the Bible. By good reading, I mean is able to to see past the five thousand years of translations and idioms and you know, like to really pull out what I think was meant. And I imagine it must have made a lot of
pastors and seminaries very angry to see Season four. I've heard of of last. But that's the whole thing is it's about the Pharisees and the Sadducees and Jesus being like a revolutionary and so I just yeah, season four was great. I can't wait for season five. They just finished filming it. But if you don't need to be a religious person to enjoy The Chosen, it is such a well produced show. Is it is family friendly, with the caveat that there are scenes with violence in them.
There are topics that are hard to deal with, like miscarriage. You know, there are like real life topics in the show. So it's like I would give it a rage rating of PG thirteen thematically, but PG in terms of like it's a good family show and the first few episodes are hard to get into because it's not really clear where it's going. But once you get past the third or fourth episode, it's it's a pretty gripping show and
I'd recommend it to anybody religious or not. And if you are religious and you watch it, you might have to just be okay with some of your beliefs being challenged or interpreted differently, but not in a bad way, not in a malicious way, just you know, taking different there's different beliefs represented, and I think that it's all biblical, but it may not be biblical in the way that your particular pastor or church group may have explained it before.
And I don't you know, some people might think, well, that makes it wrong, but I think that they stick to the biblical story. It's just not Yeah, I don't know how to say it.
That.
And the last thing, super quick I found this. This came up again, Beauty and the Beat of a YouTube video that just couldn't be made today. But it's so amazing. It's a belle in the hood and it's so funny. It's a yeah, that's that's basically how to describe it. Fun fun little video that's a parody of Beauty and the Beast the morning song when it's you know, hello, how's your bread?
Oh?
You know, I'm just reading a story but but but instead it's just oh, it's it's so hilarious and it has some of the early you know, YouTube comedians and stuff in it, back when when YouTube was a little bit more grassroots and raw, you know. So anyway, those those are my picks, all right, Steve?
What are your picks?
Oh? Is aj Dunn? Sorry? I was taking a nap there for a second. Good.
I wanted to give you time, Steve.
You gave me plenty of trust me. Okay.
So, as I mentioned earlier, the little article I saw about in MySpace, it's on trib live dot com. It says MySpace celebrates his twenty first birthday? Do we still need it? So I didn't even know what existed either.
I used it in a while. I can remember when it first came out, and one of the from a coding standpoint, if you want to look at it from that standpoint, it was, if I remember, the big thing was it allowed you to customize like CSS, and so you had people doing whole businesses off of creating customized MySpace themes for people to have for their own profile. I know I've heard some people say that was how they really started to learn about front end styling and
theming with CSS and HTML. So maybe from a security standpoint, it wasn't the best thing, but in terms of being a tool to allow people to learn how to use the web and make the web look good, it seems to have its own space encoding history.
Now for the.
Totally in Oh we Lost Jeff there might not know that the dad jokes are the high point of any of these podcasts, So.
Here they are.
So the other day I saw a microbiologist. He was a lot bigger than I expected, right. And then over the weekend I was working on my house, doing some you know, work around the house, and I fell off a fifty foot ladder. Fortunately I was only on the bottom step. And then here's a thought on Disney and Pinocchio was reading some about him lately, probably on TMS or something, and heard that he hasn't had much luck
on dating apps. But I mean, what do you expect from a guy who's looking for relationship with no strings attached?
Those are my picks, all.
Right, I'm gonna jump in do my picks real fast. So the first pick is I usually totally. I usually do a board game pick. Of course, you've been on before, you probably know that I'm going to pick a game Challengers.
It's kind of a mix of Capture the Flag and war. So you start out with your base set, you build your.
Deck, and then you play one on one against somebody else that's playing, and you flip over cards until you've beat their top card.
Then you get the flag. I mean that's more or less it.
I mean the deck building gets a little involved, but that's effectively the game. It'll play up to eight people, and so you play seven rounds and you just rotate chairs, right, so each of you get a little schedule, right, So you're on the red and then you're on the green, and then you're on the yellow, and then you're back to the red, and then whoever has the most points at the end of the round or at the end of the seventh round, the two top two go head to head and.
Whoever wins wins. That's the game, really really fun game.
I tried to teach it to my family last night, and I have to admit my wife was tired and didn't want to play more than two rounds. But let me get the board game wait for you, Here we go Challengers. It is waited at one point seven to eight, so that's that's pretty approachable for most casual gamers. The first time you play it, it takes a little bit to kind of figure some of it out, but then
after that you're kind of good to go. A couple of other picks here real quick, I've been reading Obi Fernandez's book on AI and I am really enjoying getting into AI. So I'm gonna put a link to that in the chat and then it'll show up his comments on.
Facebook, Twitch, and YouTube.
But the last thing is, and I'm just going to put it out there, I am working on getting AI for JavaScript dot com launched. You'll get emails from me about how to do AI and JavaScript. I'm putting together an AI summit at the end of September, and just to give you a little bit of context, it's not focused on JavaScript or Ruby or any other language per se. It is primarily focused on how do you add AI features to your apps, So we're also not getting into
PyTorch or anything like that. And then I'm going to do a boot camp starting in late October early November, and we'll go through Okay, here's how you use some of the transcription services. Here's how you use some of the the services like chat or GPT four, or you know some of the other ones that are out there. If you need a more custom model, here's how you
use LAMA three or something like that. So we're just going to go into all of that, some of the other computer vision and image generation, video generation.
So we'll get into all of that in the boot camp.
And so I don't have a website for it yet, but that's coming. So if you sign up for the summit or sign it for the email list, you'll definitely get notified when.
That comes out. So those are my picks totally. What are your picks?
Yeah, so I've got three. The first one is a hobby you might want to try if you want to get better at communication. The general umbrella is called authentic relating, and then there are a few sub communities. There's NBC Nonviolent Communication and circling. And I forgot the third one. Yeah, it's a really great group of people. You build type ons, you get to know yourself more, and I've noticed my ability to communicate with my coworkers really increased since I
started doing it. The second one is akuryoga or partner acrobatics. Essentially you do acrobatics with somebody else, but it has a more smooth kind of feel to it rather than cheerleading. And it's also a really great way to get to know other people and learn more of that somatic communication. And the third thing is a resource that I've been writing.
It's called The Neurodivergent Guide to the Workplace. So if you identify as neurodivergent, or if you simply want to learn some cool tricks on how to navigate the workplace, better check it out. It's on os dot, totally dot.
Me awesome, all right. If people want to follow you online, where do they find you?
Totally dot me.
Last thing, it's lcsquad dot com for the lead Code meet up if you're in New.
York and totally is t o l I right, all.
Right, Well, thanks for coming. Tell Jeff thanks for us. We'll wrap it up until next time.
Max Al