Issue #479: "Keep good company, read good books, love good things." - Louisa May Alcott
Hey friends!
I hope you had a good week! I finished a project I’d been procrastinating on and have been experimenting with some different tools. It’s been really fun. Time to suuurf!
Do you like this newsletter? Prove it! Ha ha ha just kidding… but also please share it with your friends!
Web links of the week
The people holding up the internet
2026 Stack Overflow Developer Survey
yet another way to invoke functions without parentheses
What 10,000 home pages put in their head
Something that interested me this week
This week I rewrote my newsletter subscription page and built a static version of my issue archive!
I blogged about the process here, but if you don’t want to read Yet Another Thing, long story short: It was complex but fun. I procrastinated a lot on doing it after trying and failing for years. AI tools helped me write some janky scripts. I have more plans. Wee!
Also, something that made me so happy is two of our readers here (who answer our interview question of the week all the time) met up in real life! Ten and David were both on a trip to Japan at the same time and it absolutely made my week to see them meet because of this lil mail in your inboxes.
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Interview question of the week
Last week, I had you maximize your candy while trick-or-treating! Tasty answers David, Ten, Kyle, Bushwazi, Amine, Christian, Madhav, Greg, Rhett, and the ghostly devs in the Ruby Users Forum!
This week’s question:
There’s a ghost in your keyboard! It keeps typing weird symbols in your words. Given a string you typed (with the ghost), # deletes the last character and ~ duplicates it, if one exists. Return the final text.
Examples:
ghostwriter("ghost")
> "ghost"
ghostwriter("a#~b")
> "b"
ghostwriter("ab~c#")
> "abb"
ghostwriter("BBB##O~")
> 'BOO'(you can submit your answers by replying to this email with a link to your solution, or share on Bluesky, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Mastodon)
Cool things from around the internet
Game Boy logo, console and packaging
Magician Dani DaOrtiz Fools Penn & Teller with Card Magic Trick (video)
Nuxroskb +84 Keyboard with KeyKobo CINQUE TERRE keycaps
Go Lives
Joke
They tried to make a diamond shaped like a duck.
It quacked under the pressure!
That’s all for now, folks! Have a great week. Be safe, make good choices, and let yourself slow down!
Special thanks to Ben, Kinetic Labs, and Marta for supporting my Patreon and this newsletter!
cassidoo
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