I’ve recently been returning to writing some software. I was looking for an automated solution to allow me to do the following things :
I also wanted something that would alert me to new vulnerabilities appearing even when I’ve not performed a build on the project for a while. Ideally, this would be free until I find a revenue stream for the software.
As part of my ongoing solar project I wanted some basic weather forecast information to help make judgements around cloud coverage. The good people at OpenWeather provide an api with a free tier that includes forecasted cloud coverage data hourly for a couple of days.
The api returns a JSON structure that looks like this :
{
"lat": 50.8,
"lon": 0.027,
"timezone": "Europe/London",
"timezone_offset": 0,
"current": {
"dt": 1644836705,
"sunrise": 1644822797,
"sunset": 1644858426,
"temp": 281.32,
"feels_like": 277.84,
"pressure": 997,
"humidity": 80,
"dew_point": 278.08,
"uvi": 0.98,
"clouds": 75,
"visibility": 10000,
"wind_speed": 6.69,
"wind_deg": 250,
"weather": [
{
"id": 803,
"main": "Clouds",
"description": "broken clouds",
"icon": "04d"
}
]
},
"hourly": [
{
"dt": 1644836400,
"temp": 281.32,
"feels_like": 277.47,
"pressure": 997,
"humidity": 80,
"dew_point": 278.08,
"uvi": 0.98,
"clouds": 75,
"visibility": 10000,
"wind_speed": 7.9,
"wind_deg": 242,
"wind_gust": 12.16,
"weather": [
{
"id": 803,
"main": "Clouds",
"description": "broken clouds",
"icon": "04d"
}
],
"pop": 0.05
},
.
.
.
With 48 of those hourly snippets covering the next two days.
I’ve recently been working with a few folks looking to start out in coding/development careers. Quite a few entry-level positions seem to be filtered by programming tests. I won’t go into my feeling on these, as personally, I’m not a huge fan of this approach. As an employer, I was always more interested in the individual’s character and approach to problem-solving as opposed to a pressured machine judged pass/fail.
However, with that said, these styles of testing have become more common. They perform many of these tests in web-based environments. So it’s worth becoming familiar with the tools available. https://leetcode.com/ is a good example of a tool used. It is worth getting familiar with these environments. It has a significant number of exercises, they are a bit recursion biased (from my samples) but can give you a good idea of what to expect.