DEV Community: Epic Lee

I created a Twitter bot to get Elon Musk to follow me

Epic Lee — Wed, 08 Jul 2020 20:21:15 +0000

Due to boredom at work, I thought of an idea.

What if I tweeted everyday something like

"Day XXX, has @ElonMusk followed me yet?"

If he actually followed me, that would be amazing, and I could write it on my resume.

So off I went.

Step 1: Create Twitter developer account

I created a new twitter account called @ElonMuskFan8. To grab Elon's interest, I made my profile a picture of him next to Mars. Then I got API keys from Twitter's developer site. One gotcha I found was, I had to enable write access and THEN regenerate my API keys and secrets or else I'd get 401 errors when trying to POST a tweet.

Step 2: Create long-running process that sends one tweet a day.

I setup a simple nodeJS project, then installed twitter and express. My app would simply start a server and run an interval, checking each minute if it was 9:30 am. If so, I would send a tweet that said:

Day XX: Has @ElonMusk followed me yet?

Step 3: Deploy my app.

For serving my app I chose Heroku. I followed their instructions here and was able to deploy my app within 20 minutes. I also stored my API secrets in heroku's environment variables so I don't expose them in my Github repo.

Step 4: Wait

Now we wait and see if Elon Musk ever replies or follows back. It may take months or years, but we don't care since the bot is taking care of it for us.

If you like these types of posts let me know!

My code: https://github.com/qikevinjkw/elonmuskfan

Practical JS Interview Questions

Epic Lee — Mon, 08 Jun 2020 20:34:03 +0000

Let's face it, algorithms are a useless test of a candidate's experience as a frontend developer. Someone who can construct a binary tree from preorder and inorder traversal doesn't mean they can create an amazing UI with an awesome user experience. It means they got lucky you asked them a question they've seen before.

What I like to give are mini-projects the candidate can solve in a 30–45 minute timeframe. They can use any framework they like such as React, Angular, or even vanilla JavaScript! Since my firm focuses more on functionality than UI, I tend not to not be so picky about CSS. But adjust as needed.

1. Create a stopwatch

Ask them to create a simple stopwatch. It should have buttons to start, pause, and stop the timer. I created a simple example.
Gotchas:
Click the 'Start' button multiple times and see if multiple intervals are created. Most candidates make this mistake.
Ensure 'Pause' button is hidden when the stopwatch hasn't started.

Bonus questions:
style the stopwatch
show milliseconds, minutes and hours

2. Create a todo list

Enough said, so many tutorials out there about this. Tweak the problem however you like.
Bonus questions:
add pagination
make a todo editable

3. Create a simple upvote tool

This is a simple polling tool, similar to Slido, that let's users ask questions and upvote the questions so the most popular ones are shown on top. See example.
Gotchas:
Questions should be sorted by upvotes
When a question is upvoted past another question, the one with the highest upvotes should move to the top
Handle duplicate questions

Bonus questions:
Make questions editable
Add delete button next to each question
Style the app

If the user finishes ahead of time, I will usually ask them some JavaScript related questions. You can find a good list of them here.
Hope this helped!

Why Angular Sucks

Epic Lee — Sat, 06 Jun 2020 15:12:01 +0000

I wrote an article on why I think Angular sucks https://medium.com/@devinlijkw/why-angular-sucks-c90f4e734231