You have two stacks, implement a queue.

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Here's a favorite programming question for interviews that even those long out of college can do. Delightfully, one I hadn't been asked recently, except by Kris and Andy.

You have two stacks, implement a queue.

In programming, a stack is a first-in-last-out data structure with two functions: push and pop. You can push a piece of data to add it to the top of the stack, on top of all of the other pieces of data already on the stick, and you can pop the most-recently-added piece of data off the top of the stack to remove it from the stack and return its value to you.

A Twelve Year Old's Incorrect Correction

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"Shit."

"You mean, 'Shoot.'"

"No, I mean, "Shit.'"

Ages of Miracles

Book Notes

One of the best things about my Mom's houses growing up was the bookcases full of books. I would often linger at the bookcases, pull out a book, and read it. It's how I like to read books: engrossed when I feel like this is the book I should be reading. It's how I picked Voltaire's Candide to read. It's how I picked this book to read.

Mom had suggested the book when we were in Portland last month. It was on sale. I bought it, and plunked it on my bookcase in the "haven't read, read at some point" stack of books. I picked it up late last week, and read it fairly quickly. I enjoyed it.

The book is a young adult book about an 11-turned-12 year old girl's life in the first months of the Earth's rotation slowing from 24 hours in a day to 72 hours in a day, and how the world changes to adapt, or not adapt as the case is with some people and places. Much of the gross (as in "total" not as in "disgusting") science is accurate enough to my understanding: the changing of the magnetic fields, the change of the radiation reaching the planet surface, the dying of many plants unable to adapt so quickly to the longer, hotter days and longer, colder nights. Many of the speculated societal changes presented were plausible.

Celebrating the Partial Successes

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This was originally posted on The Pastry Box for 1 April 2015.

Flipping on the pronoun number rule

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So, I'm writing up my notes on my FluentConf talk, and realizing that I'm struggling a bit with the pronouns in the book. Gendered pronouns unwittingly make assumptions about the reader, assumptions I don't want to make. I also don't want to insult 51% of my readers by using an unassociated gendered pronoun (yes, I recognize the projection / assumption that my readership is nominally even for the two main genders, let's go with it).

I grew up learning the two grammar rules.

1. A pronoun's and its antecedent's numbers should match.

Use "her" referring to single female antecedents, and "him" to single male antecedents. "They" and "their" are for plural antecedents, don't match a single-numbered subject number-wise, and would be, therefore, incorrect.

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