Presentation by Esther Seyffarth on October 24, 2019, at the code.talks conference in Hamburg, Germany.
Description of the talk:
As a developer, it is easy to get somewhat stuck in your ways over the years. But what if someone suddenly tells you you're not allowed to solve a basic task the way you've always done it? I put myself in this hypothetical scenario and came up with 20 ways to reverse a string in Python, each one worse than the one before. Can you find out why each of my twenty solutions is terrible? Join me on a journey involving neural nets, bogosort, Blender, a printer, scissors, glue, and a deep look into your own mind as we discuss the way each solution works, debate the problems and disadvantages of each one, and incidentally learn about lots of modules and libraries in Python that you never dreamed could be used for reversing strings. Finally, I will challenge each of you to produce a string-reversing function that is different from all the ones I've presented. Will we find the worst humanly-possible way to reverse strings?
The file Esther Seyffarth - 20 Terrible Ways to Reverse a String.ipynb contains the visuals for the presentation. You can execute individual cells in the notebook or look at the python files in the data folder.
Can you find more terrible and fun ways to reverse a string? Let me know!