codewars set reducer solution

...Oof

I did my first codewars problem today. SchipThatcode was doing one on stream. I figured I'd give it a shot too.

Fuck me.

It took four hours.

It was the Set Reducer problem. Here's what I ended up with:

Code

const input = [2, 4, 4, 6, 2, 1, 1, 5, 
6, 7, 8, 8, 8, 8, 9, 0, 1, 1, 5, 4, 4]

const musher = (input) => {
  if (input.length > 1) {
    let counter = 1
    for (let i = 0; i < input.length; i++) {
      if (input[i] != input[i+1]){
        input[i] = counter
        counter = 1
      } else {
        input[i] = -1
        counter += 1
      }
    }
    return musher(input.filter((n) => n >= 0))
  } else {
    return input
  }
}

console.log(musher(input))

I haven't looked at all the other ways to do it. I'm sure there are more... pick your adjective... approaches. I don't really care. These things aren't for me.

Creative Coding

I love coding. I spend most of my time hacking away on things. But, coding is a means to an end. What I really love is making things. And at the end of those four hours, I have nothing to show for it. I didn't actually make anything.

I'm glad I did one because I like trying new things, but I don't expect to be doing any more.

I hear a lot of folks ask about ideas for projects to do instead of things like codewars. Something practical to spend their time on. If you're in need of inspiration I made a little side with a ton of ideas on it.

ideas.alanwsmith.com

Give one of those a shot and see how it works for you

For now, I'm going back to working on ASCII_BEAR

Notes

First off: You should totally follow Schip's stream. It's awesome
If you love codewars, I'm legit happy you've found something you're into. It genuinely looks cool. It's just not for me
I very much speaking from a position of privilege. Specifically, I'm not having to practice this kind of stuff in prep for technical interviews. Based on today, I'm not sure I could get past one even though I'm not half bad at throwing around ones and zeros
Apologies for the lack of syntax highlighting in the code sample. I'm in the process of building a new static site generator and haven't gotten to that yet.