ECMAScript Archives - Aurelio De Rosa blog

From JavaScript developer to JavaScript engineer: find all celebrities in a set of people

In the first article of my series From JavaScript developer to JavaScript engineer titled From JavaScript developer to JavaScript engineer: Re-implementing ECMAScript 2015’s String.prototype.repeat() method I’ve discussed how computer science concepts can help in writing better and more elegant software. Specifically, I’ve demonstrated how to use appropriate algorithms and data structures, together with techniques like memoization, to re-implement the String.prototype.repeat() method so that it’s blazing fast.

In this second article of the series, I’ll discuss how important is reasoning about the problem we’re facing. To do that, I’ll analyze the problem of finding all celebrities in a set of people.

If you want to take a look at the final solution, you can either go to the section An efficient solution or browse my Interview questions repository on GitHub.

From JavaScript developer to JavaScript engineer: re-implementing ECMAScript 2015’s String.prototype.repeat() method

As developers, our work is to solve problems which often implies writing code. Some of the problems we face look really simple in nature, but their simplicity leads us to write sub-optimal solutions without even realizing it. JavaScript developers come from very different backgrounds, and assuming that everyone has the same base knowledge of computer science is, at least, misguided. However, we should strive to gain understanding of this field as computer science concepts can help in writing better and more elegant software.

In this article, the first of a series titled From JavaScript developer to JavaScript engineer, I’ll discuss how to re-implement ECMAScript 2015’s String.prototype.repeat() method. What this method does, repeating a string, is pretty simple and a basic implementation would be simple as well. But by using appropriate algorithms and data structures, we can heavily improve the performance of this method.

If you want to take a look at the final solution, you can either go to the section An efficient solution or browse my Interview questions repository on GitHub.

Monkey patching in JavaScript

When working on a project, we often use libraries that implement methods that aren’t built-in in the programming language in use but we need. These libraries don’t cover all the possible methods, so they might lack one or more crucial features we need. When this happens, we have two choices: the first is to create our own module that implements the methods we need, the second is to add those methods to the library itself or the built-in classes of the language. The latter is known as Monkey patching.

In this article, we’ll look at what Monkey patching is, what pros and cons it has, and also a couple of examples that employ this technique.