Blog | Colin Chang

Hacker Rank

In an effort to hone my technical skills I’m going to solve and blog solutions to problems at hackerrank. You can follow me at hackerrank.com/calling. All of my solutions, barring unforeseen circumstances will be written in Javascript, which hackerrank seems to run in a Node environment.

Hacker Rank — Maximizing XOR

Problem: https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/maximizing-xor My solution:

String.prototype.indexOf and _.indexOf

Today I was surprised to learn that the behavior for _.indexOf is not equivalent to indexOf on Strings.

now.js

Today I wrote and shipped now.js, a simple app that shows what I am doing now-ish. For the time being, it shows the music I am listening to and the books I am currently reading. It updates “automatically” at least once per day. I plan to add other categories like fitness tracking, food tracking, movie tracking, and location tracking. I also plan to change the look-and-feel, but I have not yet decided how best to present the information.

Beat The Streak

Over the weekend my friend introduced me to Beat The Streak, a fantasy baseball game where you try to break Joe DiMaggio’s 1941 record of 56 straight games with a hit. As a participant, your job is much more feasible (albeit less straightforward) than what DiMaggio did — merely predict a player each day who will earn a hit for 57 straight (game) days. This sounds deceivingly easy.