Algorithms, Job-Hunting and Sketching

My name is Josephine, and I have an erratic, confusing and often strangely specific work history. (Lithography on giant sandstones, has anyone else been there? Probably not.) I am nearing the end of a recruitment process. The job that I’m hoping to get somehow includes graphic arts, teaching, problem-solving, MongoDB and JavaScript. Let me show you some of the reasons why I am really hoping that they choose me. Let’s look at the need for problem-solving and teaching. I’ve just finished a year-long internship as a technical solution engineer at Criteo. Prior to that I’d been working as an ESL teacher for 7 years. I’ll try hard to break down a solution to <a href="https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/bigger-is-greater/problem?isFullScreen=true" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">this problem</a> on HackerRank. The problem is called “Bigger is Greater”. The idea is that you create a function which receives a string. You can shift the order of the letters, without changing which letters make up the string. The idea is to shift the letters, such that you come up with a string that has a greater lexicographic value than the original string. Having said that, it cannot be any old value. It must be the next possible greater value, not some other one that is higher again. In case it’s not clear, lexicographic value refers to its value in terms of alphabetical order. So if it would come first or last in a series of alphabetically ordered strings. One important point to note is that this is not possible with some strings. For example, the string “bb” cannot be made an lexicographically bigger by moving around its components. In this case, our problem’s solution must return “no answer”. I begin by creating two separate functions that will be used within my main function. Every character/letter has a charcode, a number which identifies it. I thought that it would be easier to work with charcodes than letters. I created these functions: <a href="https://medium.com/@josephineanngeoghegan/algorithms-job-hunting-and-sketching-193f3d2809c5">Visit Now</a>