Today is Day 2 at the Recurse Center, and I’m making it a point to write down stuff that I’ve been working on, regardless of how small they are!

Day 1

1.1 Small programming challenges

Hadn’t written any code for this month, so I thought I’d start out with small dailyprogrammer exercises. Worked on a couple of easy challenges parallel with other Recursers. Looking at solutions on second one on square spirals was quite a learning point on how to eliminate your search space instead of generating the entire thing.

Also played around with Google Foobar, a fun little challenge that popped up when we Googled python list comprehensions. Completed the first simple challenge, which was given a multi-digit number, sum up all of the digits, which gives you a new number. Keep on summing up the digits until you are left with just one. Still trying to get used to doing things the Python way.

My solution on repl.it here.

Day 2

2.1 Small programming challenges

Continued with the Foobar challenges. Level 2 Challenge 1 was given a number of time intervals, find the maximum number of time intervals you can attend without any overlaps. Tried to come up with a fancy algorithm for it that included putting all the intervals in a big timeline and weed out the overlaps (which only passed 2 test cases D:) but found a handy-dandy algorithm that just did that (after struggling for a couple of hours) over here: Activity Selection Problem. It makes sense but I still don’t understand why it’s optimal, might revisit sometime soon.

My implementation on repl.it here.

2.2 WebRTC

Web Real Time Communications, peer to peer browser stuff

Also looked at WebRTC for a bit. This HTML5Rocks tutorial seems like a great place to start and the demos of WebRTC capabilities are pretty darn cool.

I’m interested in playing around with WebRTC and to get a better idea of how P2P clients work over the web. Some implementations of WebRTC worth looking into:

  • Chat clients
  • Video and audio chatrooms
  • P2P JS games
  • File transfer (this might be fun!) e.g. Sharedrop