For a little while now I’ve been messing around with Clojure and Lambda as components of a side project. The basic idea for this little piece is that I get a bunch of image URLs along with some metadata from an api like Imgur, then send those URLs to Lambda which reuploads them into an S3 bucket.

Hello! At the time this article was written, CoffeeScript was a great alternative to vanilla JS and I would have wholeheartedly recommended it for new projects. Since then, most of the cool stuff from CoffeeScript (plus a lot more) has been brought into mainline JS with ES6 and ES7. If you aren’t already, I’d recommend using them over CoffeeScript nowadays.

I came across this problem online:

If you ever had a flip phone, you probably used T9 to compose text messages. T9 let you enter words with a single tap on each number key, instead of selecting each letter with multiple presses (otherwise to get ‘c’, you’d need to hit ‘2’ three times). It looked at all possible word-pieces that a combination of key presses could create, and then it suggested words to the user based on those pieces.

This is the algorithm that helped me understand dynamic programming.

This is a quick intro to the Neo4j graph database and its Cypher query language, based on a talk I gave at Hack Reactor a few days ago. By the end of this post, you’ll have a general idea of how to read Cypher, you’ll have a starting point for going through other tutorials, and most importantly I hope you’ll be excited about the possibilities Neo4j can open up in your own projects.

Update 4/3: Someone was nice enough to post this on Hacker News, so there’s some further discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9314185 for those interested.