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The Loop That Wasn't

Thirty minutes into a Codewars problem that should have taken five, I finally found the bug. It wasn't a logic error. It wasn't a missing edge case. It was a mental model problem I'd been carrying without knowing it, and once I saw it, everything snapped into place.

The problem: count the truthy values in a list. Simple. I'd written this kind of loop before, in OSSU, in practice sets, in small utilities I'd built for my own work. I knew how loops worked. Except I didn't, quite.

Three Patterns That Run Half of Algorithm Problems

The more Codewars problems I work through, the more I notice that a large percentage of them are really asking the same three questions in different costumes. Not the same answers — the same underlying structures.

Accumulator. Frequency Counter. Two-Pointer. If you can recognize which one you're looking at, the problem goes from "where do I even start" to "which version of this pattern applies here."

The Week I Rode a Robot and Learned to Talk to One

The week that Code Platoon started, I took my first ride in a fully autonomous vehicle.

No driver. No steering wheel. Just a smooth electric box navigating the Las Vegas Strip at normal speed while my wife and I sat facing each other in silence, watching the city scroll past like a screensaver. Zoox. Amazon-owned robotaxi program, currently operating on a stretch of Strip corridor between major resorts. We caught one near the Aria and rode it down to the Wynn.