#programming practice

Problem Description: 

Given a string s, find and return the first instance of a non-repeating character in it. If there is no such character, return '_'.

Example:

For s = "abacabad", the output should be firstNotRepeatingCharacter(s) = 'c'. There are 2 non-repeating characters in the string: 'c' and 'd'. Return c since it appears in the string first.

Try solving the problem first before looking at my problem analysis & solution!

1. Pong

Everyone loves Pong! The graphic aspect isn’t too complicated. Choose a dark background, add some borders, the paddles, the ball and the score counters and you’re all set! If you want to get fancy adjust the size of the text for the score counters as they increase in digits. To avoid having to make an AI, make a two-player game or just make the paddle follow the ball for an impossible difficulty. Pong isn’t about winning, anyway. It’s just a fun little game to relax to. The hardest part about making pong is making the ball interact with the paddles and walls. I took a short cut and just coded the cases for the inner-facing sides of  the paddles and the top and bottom walls.

2. Moving shapes

Games are fun to program, but did you know that a program doesn’t have to have a clear goal in mind to be fun to interact with? All this idea needs is to take input from the location of a mouse click and make something happen. In this case, I programmed 8 circles to explode from the originating mouse click. The circles don’t even need to interact with each other or future mouse clicks for this program to be fun to play around with. After I made this, I spent hours coming back to it and trying to see how fast I can click the mouse or what happens if I click it in a certain pattern.

3. Bubbles

If you had a computer that ran on Vista, you might be familiar with the bubble screensaver. While it was not as effective as a screensaver, it was sure fun to watch! You can create bubbles upon running the program or use a user input (a mouse click) to create bubbles. You will need to program collision into these bubbles to make them bounce off each others and the sides of your boundary. Once you have everything set up, just run the program and watch your bubbles endlessly bounce around for a relaxing visual stimulus!

4. A simple platformer

If you’re interested in making games, platformers are a solid genre to start with. You don’t need fancy graphics like Mario or extreme difficulty like the Impossible Game. All you need is a shape to be the player’s character, give it a constant speed forward, and a track with gaps. You can make the track manually or design it to be randomly generated. Since the track is one-dimensional, random generation wouldn’t be too complicated. Don’t forget to bind a jumping (or other) mechanic to a keyboard key (spacebar) and you’re good to go! You’re on your way to becoming a game developer!

5. Breakout

Hello everyone!

I’m a third-year software engineering major in university. I’ve been tumblr-ing for a while now, but I really have a passion for what I’m studying and would like to share my experiences as a black female in the technology industry as well as some tips that have allowed me to experience and discover some pretty cool opportunities.

Additionally, I would love to provide any programming help to anyone who would live to delve into this field as well as go through some sample coding interview problems found on the web and elsewhere. I am not an expert by any means, so I am interested in learning as well!

Also, here's the crosshair I made because I got tired of guessing where my ray casting was happening from for click detection for hitting things.

Consistency: this applies to formatting, using braces, naming (variables, classes, methods) and directory layout (if you bury a source directory somewhere under /css I’m coming after you with a machete); Having said that programmers have a bad habit of thinking they will remember where it is or they cannot forget about this file EVER but after 20 minutes away from the computer suddenly the work…

If you have used Google Go in a real world project/application, you will feel all warm and nice after your code can be compiled and your application runs. It usually runs almost flawlessly - or only requires a few minor tweaks before its ready for production. I have felt it many times while building stuff in Go and never felt similar in other languages. And I always wondered why this happened only with Go.

I think that this feeling comes from the fact that you know unconsciously that the program you wrote is rock solid and fast (usually).  How do you know that? Go's toolset and philosophy towards building programs has a lot to contribute to this feeling. Like - 

Error Handling: I think this is by far the biggest thing that contributes to the warm fuzzy feeling. Go forces you to handle (or explicitly) ignore the error/edge cases in your code, then and there. It throws a compiler error otherwise. So by the time you reach the point where you can compile the code you know that you have handled all the error cases. The code would not have compiled otherwise.

Gofmt: No more arguing about the best conventions or whether you want the opening brace on the same line or the next one. Gofmt does the job for you and you don't need to worry about it - ever. Its so damn easy to use it as plugin in your favorite editor and run it every time you save a .go file. Everyone's code looks the same, reads the same and feels the same.

Static types: Coming from the world of dynamic languages like Ruby, Python and Javascript, having static types is a god send. You are confident that you are dealing with one type of data structure and that one only. Go's syntax is sufficiently terse (and readable at the same time!) that your program doesn't look too verbose or dense. If you do want variables with "dynamic properties" there is always the interface{} type that you can fall back into.

No Manual Memory Management: Go's memory is managed. Its GC is already performant and is increasing in efficiency as the language/compiler has evolved. I think this gives it a huge leg up from other languages like C++ where memory is managed manually. I want to focus on getting the task done, not think about managing memory. 

Unused imports and are circular imports are compiler errors: This is really good since it forces you to keep your overall project structure clean and terse.

There is always an idiomatic way to do things in Go: The Go community and the golang.org website have made it really explicit on what is a good way to write code and what isn't. So when you are going through resources or talking with other people about writing Go code, you will always notice that there is a huge emphasis on writing the things the idiomatic/correct way unless there is a good reason not to. It leads to efficient, readable and clean code. I refer people a lot to the (really well written!) Effective Go page where you can easily understand the best practices of the language.