I have a neighbor with a really annoying car alarm.

It went off at 2am.

It’s not the first time it’s gone off in the middle of the night (though sometimes it goes off in the middle of my work meetings; variety really is the spice of life).

I can’t go back to sleep once I’ve woken up (doing so, like, always results in getting a migraine).

I am so tired.

Kind of proud of this one.

CSS for JavaScript Developers is my new favorite thing. I’m learning so much about CSS that I never realized before and it’s getting me to think about CSS in different ways.

Unrelatedly, I’ve been doing #catober for #inktober.

Also, I’m still alive. ❤️

🎶
Jenkins failing
How can testing BE so hard
This test case isn’t written right
🎶

Knowing when to take a break from a problem.

It takes 6 minutes to run a single test file.

How is your day going?

I couldn't sleep, so https://country-blobcats.netlify.app/... now exists. May it bring you joy.

I accidentally created something adorable. See, what happened was I wanted to figure out how to programmatically create blobcats for different countries, since I’d done it by hand for every country represented at my company and wanted a quick way to catch up once we add people from different countries.

Enter Cloudinary!
Wrote a transform that would take the image, shrink it to 150 px wide, then add the blobcat emoji as the underlayer behind and above it, then add the little arms I drew die holding the flag on top.

And that worked! I had a folder of flags and the frontend could query them using the transformations and the country blobcats were born! I even added a preset so I could view the little blobcats with their flags when I looked at the uploaded flags

But then I’m like “Eh, each transform adds a thing against my limit and I really don’t want to go over if this gets popular (why do I ever think _that’s_ a possibility?). I know! I’ll just add the transform on upload and reupload all the flags to a different folder! Then I’ll just need to request the image instead of having to do the transform per request.

And that worked!

But I forgot I still had my preset transform on.

So in addition to the successful country blobcat, I had a preview of what I like to call papa blobcat with kitten blobcat.

You have an array of objects with a startIndex and endIndex representing their position in a string & you want to end up with a nested structure to represent their relation in the string (i.e., A is from 1 to 10, B from 3 to 5, C from 4 to 5, D from 7 to 9). How would you do it?

Input array looks like: https://gist.github.com/AmyShackles...

Desired output looks like: https://gist.github.com/AmyShackles...

(Though what I really have to start with is an object whose keys are the start index and whose values are values of each element in the above input array, so if you can think of a way to morph it without needing to turn it into an array first that’d also be cool)

Figured I’ve been stuck on this part of my side project for long enough that I really should just make a desperate cry for help. ❤️

I am still alive. Learning Spanish. Miss you lot.

Trying to spend non-work time doing things other than coding. Which means picking up new hobbies. 😅

Currently trying to teach myself how to draw cartoon cats.

Today, I worked on facial expressions.

I forgot what it felt like to not be the domain expert in a thing. 😅 Have to learn a ton of new things for work, which is great, but I feel guilty for being so slow. SO SLOW.

I know it’s normal, I’m just…. Getting used to it. 😉

Anyway, here’s a cat.

https://you-lot.are.obviously.best

Seriously. I appreciate y’all.

To make this more of a story so as to not enrage those of you who get aggro about misuse of the categorization system... I’m a little anxious about starting the new job, but it’s more the stress of the possibility of not having equipment in time more than anything else. I have an appointment to get the first dose of a Covid vaccine tomorrow and I’m excited about that, though I’m kind of exhausted otherwise. I really feel envious of introverts these days.

My most recent side project is meant to be a lighthearted thing with a dynamic subdomain where anyone can type [whatever-subdomain-they-want].is.obviously.best or [whatever-subdomain-they-want].are.obviously.best or [whatever-subdomain-they-want].is.not.obviously.best or [whatever-subdomain-they-want].are.not.obviously.best.

I have a list of political terms and people that route to an HTML page that says “[subdomain] has been flagged as political. The creator of this site intended this domain to be used to spread joy and merriment and feels that pushing political agendas undermines that intent.”

I have sentiment analysis in combination with a disallow list on is/are (positive, rather than is.not and are.not) routes that if the subdomain is flagged as negative by sentiment analysis or matches a term in the disallow list, it serves an HTML page that says “[subdomain] is/are NOT obviously best. What the hell is your problem?”

Sentiment analysis only goes so far and it’s hard for it to catch a lot of things (since it’s a small amount of input) and I’m not confident that I’ll think of all of the possible things that really shouldn’t resolve to is/are OBVIOUSLY best.

Is there anything you guys can think of that should be on the disallow list?

If it helps, the disallow list so far is https://raw.githubusercontent.com/A...

Guys!

I got a job offer! I start the 26th! (Assuming all goes well)

!dev

There’s nothing more frustrating than feeling depressed and apathetic toward everything for days, like the walls are closing in, you’re never going to achieve your goals, and there’s no point to living... only to realize it’s just that it’s “that time of the month”.

I miss the days when my PMS was literally just “Random commercials make me cry”.

To clarify, I would probably catch on that these emotions are just a hormonal reaction if “that time of the month” happened every month. Nexplanon is a weird birth control.

I’m sure this thread was overshare, but I just wanted to express my frustration.

Here’s Bob being stealth

I posted a long-winded Twitter thread describing the experience I have in software development and advertising that I’m looking for a job. It felt awkward as hell to do, but yolo. I’ve had a few people reach out as a result; here’s hoping something works out. Hilariously, absolutely forgot to talk about databases. 😅

https://twitter.com/AmyShackles/...

I wrote a base converter in AssemblyScript that could take a numeric or string radix of 2-36. String options being binary, ternary, etc.

Then I couldn’t figure out how to color scheme it, so went about it the lazy way.

I present to you: Choose your own damned background and text colors.

https://baseconverterwebassembly.netlify.app/...

I definitely made a channel in the dev Slack I'm in for algo practice with the description bigOHNOtation.

If you were to write a regular expression to match phone numbers in the format of either:
(123) 456-7890 or
123-456-7890

Would you prefer a regular expression that looked like:
A) /^(?:\(\d{3}\) |\d{3}-)\d{3}-\d{4}$/g
B) ^\(\d{3}\) \d{3}-\d{4}$|^\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4}$/g
C) Other
D) I hate regex

Reasoning? Alternative? Discuss.

(I'm curious about preferences surrounding the readability of regular expressions)

Realized there was a bug in my npm package that made it hard to update the state of the input field conditionally (rather than explicitly through user action) and fixed it, wrote tests to ensure it was working the way I thought it was, updated the dist, updated the package version, merged, cut a GitHub release...

Then uninstalled and reinstalled it in the project I’m using it in and it didn’t work. What the eff, I think. Take a couple hours furiously trying to figure out why the hell the behavior doesn’t seem to match the behavior of the new version.

Then it dawns on me. I check the package.json.

“react-autosuggestions”: “^2.1.0”

.... I forgot to do the “npm publish” step.

*head desk*

Today I learned that for boolean HTML attributes, they are considered true if they're present on the element at all, regardless of their value. And that as a rule, you should specify the empty string("") in value.

This wounds me on a logic level since everywhere else in JS, "" is false.

What.

The.

Fuck.

Seriously. Why?

I released a new npm package!

I’m actually kind of proud of this one.

https://npmjs.com/package/...

I wanted to build a website to search for aircraft accidents, so scraped the NTSB and FAA websites and built a database out of it.

Then I went to write search fields for Make and Model. I wanted it to be easy to know if there were results for a given Make before someone tried to query by it. And then fell into the rabbithole of how to make something like that accessible.

One thing led to another and: https://github.com/amyshackles/...

Still need to add testing and better documentation and clean it up a bunch, but it’s starting to look like something, maybe.

Still alive, just ... quiet. Miss y’all.

That feeling when you’re scraping a website to build an API and your script downloads 4049/6170 pages before failing and you have to rewrite it so that puppeteer hits the next button 4049 times before executing the script. 😅

This database is so frustrating.

I hate this website (the one I’m scraping).

It’s going to be so satisfying when this is finished.

Can someone please read this article and sanity check me that it makes sense outside of my head and I’m not actively putting garbage out into the world?

https://amyshackles.codes/why-is-em...

I would greatly appreciate it.

There are no stupid or dumb questions. A lot of headache has been and could have been saved by one person asking what seemed like a stupid question.

I would now expand on this to say that if the question is procedural in the sense that it’s asking “what” or “how”, you should make every attempt to come to an answer yourself and then ask for clarification. If the question revolves around “why”, there are no stupid questions. A lot can be overlooked in a cascade of moving pieces.

Oh look, the code points each script_extension matches when using Unicode property escapes in JavaScript regular expressions.

https://gist.github.com/AmyShackles...

Annnnnd apropos of nothing, I’m trying to learn Hungarian on the side for fun because I made a Hungarian friend. Forgot how hard language learning was!

I wrote a thing.

https://dev.to/amyshackles/...