Just the other day I was on a phone interview when I was asked to explain the benefits of idempotency. At first, this term bewildered me, but after asking the interviewer to elaborate, I had a good idea as to what he was referring to. Nevertheless, after the interview I researched the term to get a better understanding of what idempotency is and why it’s useful when constructing RESTful APIs. This is what I learned.
Behind the Scenes of Website Hosting
Ever wonder what a hosting service is doing being the scenes that allows your website to be viewed in the browser? If this question perplexes you, as it did me, read on.
Factories vs Services
When you’re using AngularJS, just like in most other computer languages, you’ll most likely want to keep your controllers thin, storing most of your business logic and data elsewhere. This type of architectural design is referred to as “Separation of Concerns” and maintains that you split your applications tasks into different sections, where each section is responsible for a particular task. In Angular, this can be achieved through services. Two of the most popular types of services in Angular are factories and services.
Understanding O(n log(n))
The long awaited day has come and you finally graduated from a coding bootcamp. There is only one obstacle in your way from landing your dream job as a Web Developer – the technical interview. To prepare, you head to Wikipedia and start looking up the most prominent sorting algorithms. It’s here where you’re introduced to Big O notation and runtime complexities such as O(n) and O(n^2). The first few complexities are pretty straightforward, it’s only when you find yourself staring at O(n log(n)) when the confusion kicks in. If you can relate, or you just want to brush up on what exactly O(n log(n)) means, then this blog post is for you.
Finding Upcoming Concerts of Your Favorite Bands
Spotify’s API has a whole host of endpoints that allow programmers to extract data; you can access everything from artists and their top songs to information about the users themselves. One endpoint I found particularly intriguing was the User’s Top Artists and Tracks endpoint where (as the title implies) Spotify collects data of a users most listened to artists and tracks. This is when I got thinking - if Spotify aggregates your top artists, wouldn’t it be cool if you could view the upcoming concerts of your favorite artists in your area? In this blog post I’m going to demonstrate how I used Spotify’s API in conjunction with the BandsInTown API to output all of the nearby upcoming concerts of my favorite artists.