Bonfire Tears (Free Code Camp Edition)

There comes a point in every new programmers life when they hit a barrier, a wall, a threshold of understanding or non-understanding of the material at hand.

I hit that threshold yesterday.

And the day before it. It was a solution so simple; I had the right idea several times. I got explained to and encouraged, and guided and it was like their words were bouncing off my skull instead of being absorbed into my grey matter. The question was:

Remember to use Read-Search-Ask if you get stuck. Write your own code.

Here are some helpful links:

String.substr()

The given code:

I knew that, since we had lengths of different strings. The tests proved that. So I kept hardcoding for one particular string. I couldn’t get past that. How do I code this thing for different string lengths? How do you get the length of a string? .length. Right? YES. But how. Where do I put the .length? I had this code:

I found out in Free Code Camp’s Gitter chat that you can get to the end of a string with a negative number; no need to keep popping off all those letters before the “n” on Bastian. But I continued to hard code for “Bastian” and “n”. I needed a broader approach.

I tried:

But I wasn’t really making any progress. All but one of the tests were passing, and I wasn’t really utilizing .length to have a basic variance of string lengths. So I did this:

Same result. I knew I needed to have .length; up there. But where to go after that?

Finally, I had to be guided to the answer. The woman was in Britain and I am pretty sure I was keeping her awake. So we came up with this solution:

var length = target.length; gets the length of any target string and assigns it to the length variable. var isEqual = target === str.substr(-length); compares the target string with the original string, subtracting the last characters of the length variable, starting with the end of the string.

I hope I explained that right. I understand it. It takes a bit to look at and understand but when we came to that solution, I felt like a complete idiot.

I cried. I literally did. Part of that is just me already being emotional. The other part is me not wanting to put my fist through my MacBook Pro screen. Strings are characters. Not words. And I was totally getting stuck on that.

Bonfire tears indeed.