As you might imagine, my days have been full of all things job hunt. I mentioned earlier that a large part of my preparation is learning data structures and algorithms for the dreaded technical interview.

But before one even gets to the technical interview, there’s usually the coding challenge or toy problem. This can appear several different ways. Perhaps HR sends you a link to a private and timed HackerRank challenge. Or maybe suddenly your 15 minute meet and greet phone call turns into a 45 minute surprise technical screen (true story). Coding challenges are their own unique pressure.

Most code challenges that I’ve encountered so far have involved string or array manipulation. I suppose that these problems are good indicators for how comfortable you are with the basics, and based on your style, how well you know your language of choice.

Ruby’s Inject (AKA Reduce) is a lovely method that makes your code SO MUCH CLEANER. It’s great stuff, you just gotta learn the pattern. Here’s the official description of Inject/Reduce from the Ruby docs:

Combines all elements of enum by applying a binary operation, specified by a block or a symbol that names a method or operator.

If you specify a block, then for each element in enum the block is passed an accumulator value (memo) and the element. If you specify a symbol instead, then each element in the collection will be passed to the named method of memo. In either case, the result becomes the new value for memo. At the end of the iteration, the final value of memo is the return value for the method.

If you do not explicitly specify an initial value for memo, then the first element of collection is used as the initial value of memo.

Inject is great for those problems that are like “what’s the product of all the odd numbers found in this array?” Here’s a simple example problem that shows the use of reduce. It’s from Codewars.com.

• Create a function that returns the sum of the two lowest positive numbers given an array of minimum 4 integers. No floats or empty arrays will be passed.
• For example, when an array is passed like [19, 5, 42, 2, 77], the output should be 7.
• [10, 343445353,3453445, 3453545353453] should return 3453455.
• Tip: Do not modify the original array but create a new one.
• Create a function that calculates the sum of the two lowest numbers given an array of positive integers.

My First Pass Solution:

In my initial answer I decided to grab the last two numbers with min, which returns an array of the two smallest values which I saved under the variable lowest_nums. Then I returned the sum of these two elements.

But there is a better way!

In the top example, we’re chaining inject on to the result of numbers.min(2). It will take that array and perform the + operation on all of the elements of the array. The second example is the same function but in block form. It’s more verbose, but I think it’s easier to understand upon a quick glance.

Whether you go the symbol or block route, in both cases you can pass inject a starting value like this

inject(0, :+) or inject(0) { |sum, n| sum + n }

but if you don’t, as seen in my examples above, then it assumes the starting amount that is operated on is 0.

Happy injecting!