One day I stumbled upon this awesome site called “Exercism”. It mainly focuses on improving your skills via Deep Practice & Crowdsourced Mentorship, Strengthening your problem-solving skills by guiding others through the process. I got hooked onto it and then I thought why not share my learning with all. Being a Ruby programmer, my notes are Ruby based.

Things To Keep In Mind

Before tackling any program/problem/challenge you should keep certain points in your mind. Some are general, some are more language specific.

Some questions you might want to ask yourself:

1. Am I adhering to the Single Responsibility Principle?
2. Is all my code on the same abstraction level?
3. Can I combine conditional clauses?
4. How does my API look to clients of this code (i.e. how do other classes interact with this class)?
5. Do I have duplication?
6. What requirements are likely to change? Would I be able to implement such changes painlessly? [Note that it is not that you should normally guess what future requirements are, but it can be helpful on Exercism]

Use Private, that way you limit the public API of any class. It’s considered a good practice to expose as few methods as possible, so you don’t come up with a “fat interface” and has to maintain a lot of methods that probably nobody else uses (this is troublesome when you want to refactor your code but you aren’t sure if somebody is using method x or not.

If you are using in-built methods you should understand them first – how they work, what are the pros & cons, in which use-case you should use them. Don’t assume, dig them up. Some examples:

• p & puts are not the same
  p foo does puts foo.inspect , i.e., it prints the value of inspect instead of to_s, which is more suitable for debugging (for example, you can tell the difference between 1, “1” and “2\b1”, which you can’t when printing without inspect).
• to_a  is super-expensive on big ranges.
• Use string interpolation only when necessary.
  
  # Example where string interpolation is needed name = 'Anjali Jaiswal' puts "Welcome #{name}" # Example where string interpolation is not needed puts 'Hello World!'

  1 2 3 4 5 6

  # Example where string interpolation is needed name = 'Anjali Jaiswal' puts "Welcome #{name}"   # Example where string interpolation is not needed puts 'Hello World!'

• a.map(&:to_i) i.e. Symbol#to_proc  : you are passing a reference to the block (instead of a local variable) to a method. Also Symbol class implements the to_proc method which will unwrap the short version into it’s longer variant. Example:
  
  a = ["2", "3"] a.map(&:to_i) # a(&:to_i.to_proc) #=> a = [2, 3]

  1 2 3

  a = ["2", "3"] a.map(&:to_i) # a(&:to_i.to_proc) #=> a = [2, 3]

Some problems from Exercism

I have described what I learned from individual problem. I am also putting names of the relevant problems so that you can look them up. My code is uploaded on Github. Also I have explained why I used certain in-built Ruby methods. I have highlighted some specific things that you should consider in general.

Accumulate

Two ways to yield a block in ruby : yield & call

(Read “ZOMG WHY IS THIS CODE SO SLOW?”)

• Yield returns the last evaluated expression (from inside the block). So in other words, the value that yield returns is the value the block returns.
• If you want to return an array use map/select depending on situation. You don’t need to initialize an array & return it.

Anagram

Anagrams are same if sorted.

select  will return element if condition satisfies. So in case of conditions use select  over map / each .

Beer-songs

Follow this link

Binary

Use map.with_index  so that you do not have to initialize another variable & directly apply  inject on the result.

Bob

Start simple. Try to make test pass in a very easy way.

Etl

Use of each_with_object :

Grade-school

Initialize an empty hash and declare values as an array. To sort & return a hash use hash.sort.to_h .

Grains

Sometimes solution could be a single word. Check for patterns. For instance, here you don’t have to iterate 64 separate calculations in self.total. Think about the totals for the first few squares: 1, 3, 7, 15, 31. Now think about those totals in relation to powers of two. Total is a series of (2x-1) where x is 2**(n-1).

Hamming

• raise  could be another method. Always look out for single responsibility principle.
• select  &  count  are perfect methods here.
• It is considered a good practice to expose as few methods as possible, so you don’t come up with a “fat interface” and maintain a lot of methods that probably nobody else will use. This is troublesome when you want to refactor your code but you aren’t sure if somebody is using that method or not. In this exercise, the only method being called is self.compute , so this means you could make self.raise_size_mismatch  private and avoid exposing it.

Hello-world

You can pass default argument to a Ruby method :

Leap

You can minimize loop:

to:

But I won’t prefer it, because the former one is more readable. Sometimes you have to gauge which is worthier.

Phone-number

Interesting use of sub:

Raindrops

Assign common values as constant. Avoid unnecessary computing. For example you only need to check if 3, 5 & 7 are factors.

Robot-name

shuffle  method of Array (can be applied to a-z but will be futile for 0-999 as it takes lots of memory & computation). Use Default assignment  ||=

 

That’s it for now. Please do let me know how this blog helped you and whether I missed something that should be included. Sayonara for now!

On 9th Feb, 2016, Cybrilla Product Owner, Nitish Gulati, delivered a Mangalwari Gyan session on The Coffee Mug Paradigm – A Lean Product Management Strategy at our talk space in Bengaluru. His talk is slowly gathering audience and he will be a speaker at Discuss Agile’s Conference. The talk throws light on lean product strategies and agile methodologies. He he describes lean product marketing as a combination of agile & lean approaches.Nitish performed the case study to analyse marketing strategies of startups. The Coffee Mug Paradigm can help product lead companies better understand & implement lean product marketing strategies.

If you search for ‘world’s most awesome offices’, we may not feature(that result is biased in the favour of Google!).

That search result reflects the perspective of certain individuals/publishers. Seen under the light of the morning sun that brightens up the mood early morning and the track lights in the evening, ours might not fall far behind.

And to correct those search page listings on interesting office spaces, this is our honest attempt to making a slight dent in the universe of google search results.

We actually do not compete on fancy lounge spaces, conference rooms etc. Hell we don’t even have those fancy biometric access. Ours becomes a competitive space with the people put together. In my opinion, the garages where HP or Apple began were more iconic than their current offices, so was ours.

The office is workshop inspired & a Cyborg made attendance system welcomes you. But it encapsulates all features of a cutting edge system – scans RFID, uses Raspberry Pi (the credit card size computer), scanner, speaker for text to speech conversion and matrix keypad size 3X4 for delivering output in graph & charts.

We gave a detailed thought to every aspect of design and consulted with one of the best interior designers to create a work-space that has our brand values at its heart. We now have an open space office that provides us the platform to take the company forward.

With growing footprint in the international markets, we needed a space equipped with all the amenities for communication with our overseas clients. Our new office comes equipped with a conference room.

 As a company we believe in frequent iterations and our discussion room is designed in a manner that facilitates short discussions. The high table is purposefully high, so that we do not sit and keep the meetings short and when we have to, there are high chairs that are not meant for sitting for long. That’s right, we create more – discuss less.

Similarly, the large desks with capacity to seat entire teams has been designed to achieve greater collaboration. But then, for a short while everyday, you need space, for that we have the solitary room. For relaxing after work we have the kitchen area with pub like seating so that you do not have to leave office to unwind. Stay as long as you like, stay because you like it.

To keep our team members well read, we have designed a library. To help our mobile first workforce, we developed the Liborg App. The app is built with the functionality to issue books, search books by image, barcode scanning, image issue and the ability to preview any book using search.

Interestingly, the most iconic office space should be judged on whether it put a dent in its’ industry & not by being ‘Garage Inspired’.

The most iconic as judged are designed in manner that if someone has to stay back for the night, they do not miss home. That validation is subject to circumstances, ours is a welcome space where Cyborgs routinely stay back for Star War Movie Marathons & Counter Strike Nights. 

We have outgrown 5 offices in as many years and every time we moved because of organic reasons and not because we could afford it.

• The new office is more spacious, in sync with our expertise of scaling up, applications and workforce. Its’ a 3300 sq. foot space with a mix of open space and rooms, crafted to suit the needs of developers.

• The kitchen is right there with ample space to stock. This ensures the builders of robust applications stay fueled.

• We have a mini auditorium where people can speak to be heard, especially where Mangalwari Gyan and Meetups which are a regular feature.

• There are no separate rooms/cabin so that even the CEO knows he’s being watched!

• The large desks double up as dining tables for the frequent parties.

• Designed to optimize on daylight.

  We have tried to craft a fun and collaborative work space so that our people – Cyborgs feel addicted to come & stay back. Happy developers equal successful products, which in turn equals happy clients.

  We’re observing a rapid growth here, which means we’ll be able to deliver inspiring products from our inspired office. We’re on a mission to change the world using software as a vehicle and are excited to see what Summer has in store for us. With all this space we’ll also be able to host events at our office, so we’ll be excited to invite people in and show them what Cybrilla is all about.

  If you’re looking to make a career move this Summer, we are hot, why not join us in our brand new office? We’ll be hiring in many more positions in the months to come, so keep checking our latest job openings here.

  Don’t forget you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google + & YouTube for all the latest news from Cybrilla & Software Industry.