| Story points | 3 |
| Tags | algorithms clean-code |
These exercises are here to help you test out and demonstrate your knowledge of the basic flow control mechanisms and syntax for your language. These exercises are relevant whether you are doing Java, JavaScript, Python, Kotlin or any other modern language.
Please follow best practices when doing this work!
The exercises below are meant to be language-agnostic. If we use the word print in an exercise description then we mean output it to the terminal/console/stdout. We don’t mean print to a printer, and we don’t want a gui. These exercises just spit out some text.
If we say a function takes an input then we don’t mean you should ask the user to type something. What we need is a function parameter or argument.
Please don’t submit any HTML or CSS. Please don’t use document.write. We are interested in seeing how you implement these algorithms. Use console.log if you are asked to print things.
Katas are pretty common in coding (and martial arts). Katas are about practicing and perfecting fundamental skills. There are a few different skills we need to see here.
The first thing is Git! It’s seriously important so we want to see you developing good habits.
For every exercise in this project you need to make a new Pull Request on github and a new branch.
So if you are writing code for the first exercise you should do this:
git checkout main
git pull
git checkout -b task/1
Now you have branch for your hello code to live in. Create a file for your hello function to live in. Commit and push. Then make a pull request. Make some noise about your PR so that we can take a look at it and give you feedback.
While you wait for feedback, you can start the next exercise.
git checkout main # Important: Check out the main branch and make sure it is up to date before making a new branch.
git pull
git checkout -b task/2
# do the work
# commit the work
# push the work
# make a PR
# then repeat this process for the next task
Look at your network graph for your repo whenever you push your code. It should not resemble spaghetti or any other noodle. It should be neat and tidy.
You can see the network graph of your repo by looking at the url: https://github.com/[YOUR REPO PATH]/network
If you follow the simple instructions in the “what does success look like” section then you’ll be fine here.
At this point you should be using git from the command line. If you drag and drop to upload your code: You are doing it wrong. For real. Git is amazingly important and now is the time to get used to it!
Use clear and consistent names. Good code makes it’s intentions clear.
Create a function that takes in an array/list of numbers. It should find the second biggest number and the second smallest number and return them as a string with a space in between them.
For example: if the array contains [7, 7, 12, 98, 106] the output should be “12 98” because 12 is the second smallest number, and 98 is the second biggest number.
The array will not be empty and will contain at least 2 numbers.
Examples:
Input: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] Output: “2 4”
Input: [1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5] Output: “2 4”
Create a function that takes a string parameter as input, then returns a string that has the first letter of each word capitalised.
Examples
Input: “hello world” Output: Hello World
Input: “i ran there” Output: I Ran There
Create a function that takes one string parameter as input. It should return a boolean True if there is an equal number of x’s and o’s, otherwise return false.
For example: if str is “xooxxxxooxoweeeeestuffwhatever” then the output should return false because there are 6 x’s and 5 o’s.
Input: “xoox” Output: true
Input: “x” Output: false
Create a function that takes in two strings representing 2 times, the function should return the number of minutes between the 2 times. The input times will be of a 12 hour format, there will be a colon between the hours and minutes, and there will be an ‘am’ or ‘pm’ on the end of each input string.
Examples
Input: “12:40pm”, “12:00am” Output: 680
Input: “1:24am”, “1:10am” Output: 1426
This is not compulsory. But if you get it right we’ll put smiley faces in your code review :)
Write a function named maximum row sum (name it according to the convention that is common in the programming language you are writing in). This function should take in a string that represents a grid of numbers. Here is an example input:
1 3 5 8
3 2 1 2
5 5 5 7
Your function needs to return the sum of the row with the biggest sum.
Following from our example above:
1 + 3 + 5 + 8 = 17
3 + 2 + 1 + 2 = 8
5 + 5 + 5 + 7 = 22 <--- This is the biggest sum
In this case the function should return 22.