Alastair M. D. Touw 🍥 @amdt@mastodon.social

Assume this is a work of fiction.

I hate computers (and programming is terrible). 💩

I wasted too much time this afternoon dealing with a completely unreliable API, only to find out: it always returns ‘200 OK’ but is supposed to return JSON describing an object with a name ‘result’ with a value ‘0’ (for success) or ‘1’ (for failure)… but actually always returns an empty response body!

Periodic reminder that the only reason anything stays published on the Web is that someone, somewhere, is spending the time and money to keep a server running. If you bookmark something, you might want to consider archiving it as well.

This is unfortunately one of those interview questions you either already recognise and know the answer for, or struggle with; in this case, it’s a variation on a run-length encoding algorithm.

ELISP> (cl-loop for char across "aaaabbbcca\x00"
with last and count = 0
if (eql last char)
do (cl-incf count)
else
unless (= count 0)
collect (cons (string last) count)
end
and do (setq last char count 1))
(("a" . 4)
("b" . 3)
("c" . 2)
("a" . 1))

I was nerd-sniped by a problem posted by Alexey Grigorev on Twitter:

‘🔸 Input: "aaaabbbcca"
🔸 Output: [("a", 4), ("b", 3), ("c", 2), ("a", 1)]

‘Write a function that converts the input to the output’

https://twitter.com/Al_Grigor/status/1357028887209902088

I would like to have something better to share on here than venting out pent-up opinions on computers, but I also don’t have a lot going on in these COVID times.

I would summarise the Unix philosophy as answering every engineering problem with ’why don’t you just …’

Me, working from home.