FreeCodeCamp Daily Challenge Solution 5/19/2026

Riley Underwood

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May 19, 2026

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Sleep Debt (JavaScript)

Given an array of hours slept each night leading up to today, and a target number of hours per night, return how many hours of sleep you need tonight to eliminate your sleep debt.

• Include tonight’s hours in the total time needed to catch up.
• If you’ve slept enough to cover tonight’s target or more, return 0.

My Solution (JS):

function sleepDebt(hoursSlept, targetHours) {
  // Define neededHours as a single number based on how many hours away from the target each number in the array is plus the target.
  let neededHours = hoursSlept.reduce((acc, cur) => {
    return acc + (targetHours - cur)
  }, targetHours)

  // If a positive number of hours is needed, return that number otherwise default to 0.
  console.log(neededHours)
  return neededHours >= 0
  ? neededHours
  : 0
}

If you have a different solution or an improvement to this one please feel free to comment with your ideas!

See all the solutions I’ve done for these practice problems: https://github.com/BoltenBeeper/FreeCodeCamp-Daily-Coding-Practice-Solutions

Note: I do not use LLMs or AI assistance to write my code. Feel free to use this solution to learn or improve.

Dave Cross also has a great solution on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dave-cross

If you want to see more of me: boltenbeeper.github.io/portfolio