Programming Challenges

Just got a job description from a recruiter with this little gem:

"maintain internet using MS Visual Studio"

If I have to use VS to keep your internet up, your company has some serious technical challenges ahead.

My first dev job. Me and another guy get hired at the same time. He will be the lead dev, and I’ll be the junior dev on a long term project. Project gets delayed (and eventually canceled, but that’s a different story), so the lead dev decides to give me programming challenges to test my skill level. I successfully complete the challenges, but they aren’t up to his standards. Belittles me in front of our manager. Afterwards I ask him to show me how he would have done it. The dude can barely type let alone show me the way it should be done. I say nothing to the manager.

A few weeks pass, it’s clear the project we were hired for is canceled, so we are given other work. They task the lead dev with porting the company website to Wordpress so non-devs can alter content. They chose Wordpress mainly because the lead dev said he is familiar with it. Two weeks later, no progress has been made. They ask me if I can do it, and I do it in 2 days including additional functionality that was requested. Manager asks me why I thought lead dev couldn’t do what I did. I said, “I don’t think lead dev knows what the fuck he is doing. I don’t think he knows how to program.” Manager says, “Huh.”

Several months later lead dev is still there, but has yet to work on any projects with any success. They finally let him go.

Glad to finally get that off my chest.

I feel the need to take a different approach to this week's rant. I think someone needs to defend teachers, for a number of reasons. Obviously this is probably out of place on devRant but it is a kind of rant against those who think they know everything and have nothing to learn.

1) Teachers are not industry specialists. They do not spend their lives keeping on top of the latest framework or project management methodology or code management tool. They are educators and that brings its own set of out of hours challenges and training exercises.

2) They have a course to teach and have probably used the same one for quite some time. Years probably. They (should) teach the fundamentals of programming not a particular language or syntax or quirk. Those fundamentals don't really change. Logic, problem solving, precision, structures, etc.

3) They need to provide a course which will cater for different skill levels. There are always class members who are bored because it's too easy and others who struggle in any subject.

4) Teaching is like any profession - there are really, really good ones, OK ones and there are shit ones.

5) They have probably never developed a detailed project or solution in their lives. They don't know the pitfalls and challenges that teams face in this kind of environment. Should they - maybe. But the probably don't.

I think that's all... I'm not a teacher (although I did fancy the idea at a time) but just feel they get a rough ride sometimes (particularly on here).

I'm gonna start a software company and cleverly split up the work into pieces so that I can present them to potential employees as "coding challenges" during the interview and never actually hire them.

My biggest personal challenges as a dev are these two:

1. I tend to work too much (by choice), which impacts my personal spare time heavily.

2. I tend to not let loose of a problem until it is solved. This often results in longer work hours or me not taking brakes...

!rant

It's been months since I last posted in here, but I finally get to share good news for once!

I quit my current job and took an offer at a much better company in a senior developer role.

I no longer have to put up with an idiot tech lead who cannot either prioritize tasks or follow simple processes, a self-absorbed senior developer who keeps deleting my code for his because he prefers tables over divs for layouts, and an incompetent HR manager who is more concerned about his image than the welfare of us employees.

I felt pure bliss when I handed in my resignation. I feel focused and ready to tackle my next challenges at my new job in January. I can't wait.

My personal learning here is that while good things come to those who wait, it still needs you to take that first step yourself and without hesitation.

Always take the challenge.

Didn't know front end - took tasks that were front end oriented, took me longer but I learned.

Didn't know what goes on in the legacy code - took the tasks and dived right in the filth.

Fear the day the challenges will be over.

Don't be stressed about day-to-day challenges/problems. They'll mean nothing in one year or even one month. But the health damage caused by stress will stay with you.

Support: A customer complained about a nasty bug.
Senior Dev: There are no bugs in our software, just challenges that need to be solved.

Recruiters in germany try to pick your interest with coding “challenges”. I like the idea but this is actually no challenge at all! 😃

Monday struggles:
Trying to recall what I was doing last Friday

Me: I'm going to be one of the grand finalists in the google code in challenge no matter what! I will complete as many challenges as I can per day.

Also Me: *forgets it existed after a week*

Me now: *just got reminded of it* Uhh, there's too many challenges and they are too much work... I'll try again next year.

For my final project as a first year computer engineer, I have to implement a FAT32 file system using a bare metal c++ compiler that will need to work on arduino uno/due....

I've only been in the computer engineering space for 2 months.
Not sure I can do it, but I'm going to try my best!
Wish me luck

Programming is a lot like playing video games. It challenges you to beat quests/tasks and hunt enemy bugs while providing boss levels in the form of large projects with tight deadlines and project managers who like to move the goal posts.

Free breakfast before work starts
Overtime if working on weekend
Decent coffee
Quick meetings
New and fun challenges for every new project

I always hated those challenges...

Online coding challenges are so addicting!! :D
It's 4:44 now, the sky is starting to light up already, finally going to sleep.

I love coding, solving challenges or making something. But the current state of most of the jobs in the industry is sad, specially in this part of the world. I am stressed out and depressed when stuck in a never ending daily grind.

There are days when I seriously consider the idea of leaving the industry and start my own restaurant or cafe. It feels like coding for fun and doing something else for a living could be better.

Am I overthinking this? Are there any other people who are feeling the same?

I've been coding for over 8 years, and whenever a recruiter says we have you do these coding challenges or recite them an algorithm from memory, I say "You know, the longer you've been programming, the less you remember how to do this stuff, because you don't use it in real life." They say, "Well we just want to see how you think and how you solve problems." B.S.
These types of algorithmic programming challenges besides the simpler ones don't show how you think. A lot of stuff like the dynamic programming and other optimization problems were solved by phd professors after many years of research. Nobody would think up these solutions on their own.
These programming challenges weed out
experienced developers unless they want to
take the time to re-learn this stuff. It explains why google, facebook or amazon are filled with young and inexperienced developers and how come it takes so many thousands of them to get anything done, and they still have buggy products...

Signed up for a coding contest that starts at 9am. I’m bad at timed code challenges, but I’ll never get better if I don’t push myself.

Woke up in a panic, thinking I’d overslept... 1.5 hours after falling asleep.

This is definitely not going to help matters. Thanks, brain.

Coding challenges are not a waste of time when interviewing someone

Spend 14 hours a week studying more with my free time.

Things to be studied:

-discrete math
-data structures
-algorithms
-coding challenges
-problem defining
-abstraction
-other relevant maths

Other things I want to improve:

-confidence at work
-reaching out to teams with questions
-social skills
-time management
-enjoying the little things
-patience
-consistency (with everything above)

Last big thing would be being more conscious with what type of data/platforms I am digesting everyday. Just like a good diet I want to get in the habit of consuming “good” useful content that’s thought provoking or knowable rather than fast food social media carbs

Wish everyone a productive New Year!

New boss: So, you'll do just some coding, we just need to restructure current DB.
Me: Ok

One month later...
Boss: So, we are creating new LMS in WORDPRESS (yeah, fcking wordpress) so you'll do this and that and...
Me: Oh, well I like challenges so let's see.

Another month later...
Boss: WE NEED OFFLINE MOBILE APP THAT WILL DOWNLOAD WHOLE FUCKING WP WITH EVERY SINGLE VIDEO AND EVERYTHING AND STUDENT WILL LEARN FROM THAT. WE ARE OPENING IT IN ONE MONTH.

Google told me I was speaking their language and asked if I wanted to play a game in a very Matrix-esque way. I'm now in the middle of coding challenges and when I finish one of them a ascii white rabbit hops across the in browser console. You have my attention Google, well played.

Stepped out of my comfort zone and dropped a Zoom link into the channel for Lambda grads to see if anyone wanted to work through code challenges together. It ended up being enjoyable enough that I’m thinking of making it a regular thing. Meanwhile, contribution graph is still going strong.

While I am self employed, my clients can end up like my boss. In this case, one of my clients is the best "boss" I have ever had. We discuss everything from ethics to npm to development to board games. And we still get the job done.

He challenges me constantly to improve, and then we laugh over how we disagree with concepts, frameworks, etc. And we still get the job done.

It's fantastic to have a client who understands that you should be paid for your time, that lets you get what they hired you to do done without micro managing you (you trust me to actually do what you hired me to do? *gasp, shock*), and still enjoys the small talk. Though some of our ethics and society discussions can be rather large discussions.

So I’m looking at a senior dev role, and wondering what kind of coding challenges to expect, what have some of you more senior devs had to face in the past?

They sent me 4 challenges from hackerrank as part of the interview process, classified as easy. I'm stuck on the 3 one.
I guess I'm fucking retarded after all 😂

Call me boring but...

Working in a secure job with a great work/life balance, little or no travel, great people, really interesting challenges, earning a tidy salary, contributing to open source, all the while creating something worthwhile and interesting.

I have a few of those already, so can't complain.

Programming challenges:

Easy: Hello World!
Medium: Matrix multiplication
Hard: Artificial intelligence
Impossible: Coming up with meaningful names for variables and scripts...

So how do you deal with the "brilliant jerk" who is the CEO's golden chlid?

Seriously - this is one of the biggest challenges of my professional career. I have team members that have begged to not be on projects with him and others that have threatened to quit if he ever moves into a leadership role.

Has anyone dealt with this?

The best teacher that I've had is one of the teachers at my university lab.
He teaches Data Structures. We had some programming assignments and I was good at it, but whatever I'd do, he'd always find bugs, ask me to resolve it and he'd always give me challenges in the lab which is fun in the lab environment. University labs usually sticks to the sylabbus. I actually learned alot from that experience..

'Trail and Error is the best method to learn programming.'

Sometimes dealing with office politics is tougher than coding challenges!!

I've been a part of this industry for over two decades, found myself scraping and clawing my way up, recently leaving a high paying position to create my own company; in an attempt to fix the things I feel are severely broken within the ones I've worked for in the past.

Sometimes, we are challenged in ways we never thought we would be. And, it should always result in the improvement of something we never thought would be possible to improve.

There's a certain beauty of hitting a personal impasse. Because it allows you to choose a better path for yourself - which is a key element in accepting and conquering any one of life's many challenges.

So, just remember, we are - by nature - problem solvers. So what the fuck would we do, without a problem to solve?

Another chapter in the life of a novice programmer:

I work a lot with PHP and Laravel, but I feel I'm ready for different challenges. I spent all of last week searching online and getting advice on what language I should focus on next. My two first options were Java and C... So naturally I ended up choosing Python :P

At least I'm certain now and already started studying and wow, I think I made the right choice!

New episode on my clients being morons.

Got a call this morning:
Client: hello, we've got a problem here...
Me: tell me about it
C: well... Do you remember the 1200 account we loaded last week ?
Me: yes? What's wrong, we tested them, everything was alright.
C: yeah... But we just noticed we loaded them in the wrong status... Fix that!
Me: easy, we clear the database and load the correct data back.
C: NO WAY! We already worked on 3 accounts. Don't want to lose any of that. Just change the status, it's easy
Me: well not really, there's a lot more going on when you go from one status to another.
C: Don't care, just do it

So... now I need to delete the bad data, checking nothing else gets impacted in the application. And then reload that same data with the proper status this time.

As weird as this sounds like, this is the reason why I love my job. You get challenges like that every single day.

Every University should make it a requirement that CS and Info technology juniors and seniors spend time on devRant. It is an education in real world coding and business challenges. No surprises. Easier transition to being a pro.

Wish it were available when I was starting.

my coolest project is one i am currently working on. its my 12 month old daughter. She challenges me everyday and gives me enough kicking to find the best solutions for all my other projects. every developer should have this muse.

Company: We want to attract lots of new talent.
Employee: First, try to retain your existing talent. Please treat them with respect and give them every now and then challenges they deserve.

Please ask the attrition rate of every company you interview with.

(tl;dr) Protip: never take internship/training/job offers from startups.

Fucking piece of shit startups hiring innocent interns from University, hoping that they are full stack developers to build their shit website.
"I will throw challenges at you".

You fucking scum, I need a proper mentor to teach me something which is not my fucking domain. You expect me to know nodejs and reactjs, and if I don't know that means there's something wrong with my learning process?!!

I'm looking for an internship which basically means that I get company exposure to proper training unlike being your fucking slave, you uncultured swine.

Seriously, recruiters, these days jack off to google buzzwords.

Challenges sister to a typing contest.
Finishes his turn and switches the keyboard to Dvorak.
Sister types every word wrong except a and h.
Laughs hilariously.
*Sister throws the keyboard at the wall*
Totally worth it.

For this year I have four main tasks I have set myself:
1. Don't lose my job
2. Write a few toy programming languages
3. Blog about said languages and things I learnt at work
4. Get married

I'm pretty excited about most of those but would love some tips on how you guys have overcome challenges in similar endevours

Coding seems to help me overcome tragedy and depression.

There are various times when things seem helpless to me, and many times when I feel I'm not in control of anything in life, but coding I know where I am, and challenges are overcomeable.

Thanks coding.

My fucking work challenges:
1. "Talk to this thing over the internet" what language does it speak? Fuck knows
2. "Make sure all the files are correct in the server" Our server plan only allows 3 requests per second, and someone is pinging it. Can't do shit.
3. "Shit broke!" You broke it. It was working fine. In fact, all our problems stem from that 1 thing you broke!
4. "Stay here all night" The hallway to the bathroom's door is locked. I can go to my workstation but have to go outside to get to the bathroom!

Fuck, its like you don't want me to succeed

My current dream project is sailing a 21st Century Message in a Bottle across the Atlantic Ocean from US to Europe, satellite tracking it in apps and desktop environment and more importantly inspiring school children everywhere that anything you can imagine is possible. Fortunately, the project is rapidly becoming a reality - here's how:
- teamed with a few amazing devs virtually
- team created an effective infrastructure for communication and knowledge sharing
- researched oceanic patterns, satellite communications, sensors, material design, recovery logistics...
- developed budget and received funding sign off
- created realistic, yet aggressive project plan with deliverable dates
- built relationships with two Universities for Oceanic knowledge assistance
- developed a partnership with NOAA and will share info

Oh yeah, we did all that and are having fun in only 25 days so far! More challenges to come but we embrace the challenges!

I will start my own companies:-
A.I. Job Centre (true A.I. would get bored of their employer and search for greater challenges)
A.I. Counselling (dev life)
A.I. Pornsites (because all A.I. should have a binary life of work and play <3)
A cake factory (so the cake is not a lie)
A.I. devRant (to lower their work efficiency)

I then use the funds from the above to hire a team and we'd develop a flawless Wannacry for A.I. (for a dementia like effect)

You can all have your jobs back and you're welcome.

I don't like interview coding challenges. At the same time, given the skill level of some developers I've worked with who work for a contracting firm and presumably didn't get a coding test in their intervies...I understand the necessity. Some people are so bad at coding that even the simplest of coding tests can show how bad they are.

I think my favorite is being given a simple task to write code for. And that's it. No "use this specific language feature to do this specific thing". Just a task and that's it.

I got a really simple coding test once. I had to reverse a string. I could choose any language. Presumably they wanted to see loops or something, but I just used Python and did this: string[::-1]

I got the job.

I was just writing a long rant about how my rant style changed, and how I could fix anything that annoys me in a heartbeat by just putting my mind to implementing a change. Then YouTube once again paused the synth mix that was playing on my laptop in the background, with that stupid "Video paused. Continue watching?" pop-up. I even installed an add-on for it in Firefox to make it automatically click that away. I guess that YouTube did yet another bullshit update to break that, for "totally legitimate user interface improvements" or whatever. Youtube-dl faces similar challenges all the time, and it's definitely not alone in that either. I also had issues with that on Facebook when I wanted to develop on top of that, where the UI changes every other day and the API even changes every other week. And as far as backwards compatibility goes, our way or the highway!

So I did the whole "replace and move on" type of thing. I use youtube-dl often now to get my content off YouTube into a media player that doesn't fuck me over for stupid reasons like "ad fraud" (I use an ad blocker you twats, what ads am I gonna fraud against), or "battery savings" (the damn laptop is plugged in and fully topped up for fucks sake, and you do this crap even on desktop computers). Gee I wonder why creators are moving on to Floatplane and Nebula nowadays, and why people like yours truly use "highly illegal" youtube-dl. Oh and thank you for putting me in Saudi Arabia again. Pinnacle of data mining, machine learning and other such wank could not do GeoIP. for a server that used to be in a datacenter in Italy for years, and recently has been moved to another hosting provider in Germany. It's about as unchanging and static, and as easy to geolocate as you can possibly get. But hey, kill off another Google+ when?

Like seriously, yes I'm taking your Foobar challenges and you may very well be the company I end up working for. But if anything it feels like there's a shitton of stuff to fix. And the challenges themselves still using Python 2.7 honestly feels like the seldom seen tip of the iceberg.

When you ought to be doing coding challenges but spend hours tweaking your i3 config instead...

(I'll stop when I get compton working, really I will...)

I’m currently learning development thru a remote bootcamp, I spend 80% of free time trying to build stuff and doing challenges. None of my friends understand or care, how do you combat loneliness/make friends when you’re a beginner? I’ve been to a few meetups but everyone’s way ahead of me. Bootcamp classmates are cool but none are in my city.

Are coding challenges part of a hiring process necessary?

Just found hackthissite !
AMAZING! I just can't stop doing challenges!

Crazy day full of challenges. Listening to dramatic music. 7 mins before end of day solve massive problem. Stand up and throw arms in air with a cheer! ... I work in an open office of 40 or so people. I got lots of weird looks. Took headphones off office was silent. Aaaaawkward

It is increasingly difficult to believe that Google CAPTCHAs are not deliberately made unsolvable.

Everyone hates CAPTCHA, that is nothing new. As most people know, CAPTCHA frequently whines "please try again" after the user provides the correct answer. Sometimes it shows "Please select all matching images." when no new images with the named subject exist. However, now Google is taking it to a new level.

After clicking, the pictures take five seconds to fade to white and the new pictures take another five seconds to fade in. And CAPTCHA challenges have an expiry duration of two minutes. This causes CAPTCHAs to expire before it is possible to solve them.

Does Google think I am not a human because I don't have the time to waste whack-a-moling random StreetView pictures?

I have a feeling that Google is laughing at us for wasting efforts solving CAPTCHAs that are not meant to be solved.

A few Challenges at my job:
- a CEO with zero tech skills and zero memory.
- a sysadmin with literal brain damage and epilepsy (but he's great, we just have had to learn how to deal with it)
- another (volunteer) sysadmin who we call @God on Slack and who usually only shows up in extreme crises.
- the budget of a tiny organization, the web traffic of a huge site.
- incoherent business logic subject to the whims of volunteers and the loudest users
- a main revenue stream that contradicts our main mission.

it's fun! woot.

Hackerrank challenges: pretty good, a lot of them make you think a bit, or look up a mathematic formula

Hackerrank challenges using a functional language: List.fold

Five interviews and challenges later and I’m told they won’t be going further with me.
Over month of my life. Finally thought this was the one. But oh well. Depression.

I officially quit being a dev.

It’s been rad y’all.

In a universe where JavaScript was never invented, the world of programming might look vastly different. Perhaps another programming language would have taken its place, or multiple languages would have coexisted in a more harmonious ecosystem.

Without the challenges posed by JavaScript, web development may have been smoother and more streamlined. Websites could have been faster and more responsive, without the need for complex optimization techniques. There might have been fewer security vulnerabilities to worry about, and the web could have been a safer place for users.

In this utopian world, developers would have had more time to focus on building great user experiences and innovative features, rather than battling with cross-browser compatibility issues and JavaScript quirks. The internet would have been a more accessible and inclusive place, with fewer barriers to entry for those who want to build and create.

Overall, a world without the horrors of JavaScript would have been a world with less frustration and more possibilities.

(Fooling around with ChatGPT)

Who else hates hackerrank coding challenges?

This moment when you help your friend with data conversion code 😀.

By converting "super" mathlab script into real C# application so you don,t need to read the whole freking 1GB file into RAM and writing it into another 1GB matrix in order do save the result because mathlab is crap 😤.

Then that feeling when you want to create better mathlab from scrach in C# and you are actualy succeding 🤔.

Did i mention about grafical blocks for interface like in lego NXT2.0 😏

Is mathlab that crap or is programming that easy?

One of the biggest challenges for me learning to program is my memory.

Some people can pick up concepts easily and have a field day. I have to keep practicing until I memorize it properly, and even then I have the tendency to struggle.

Does this mean I give up? Helllll no. I'm far from giving up with all the progress I've made.

Had a technical interview with AWS on Wednesday. Woke up Thursday with the flu. Thanks, body, good to know the long tradition of sickness following completion of highly anticipated task is alive and well. Had to reschedule interviews and hold off on scheduling other interviews. (Damn it!)

To protect my repos from my brain on brain fog, anything I’ve done the past few days have been on branches titled “fever” or some variant thereof (“fever1”, “fever2” when there were two approaches I was trying).

Working on opensource have some interesting challenges. For example my past employee is still stalking us on GitLab, trolling and complaining. My favorite complain of his is that we are moving too fast since he left and was replaced by a junior developer working parttime :-D

I need a project. I am on holidays, I don't have a computer at hand and can only code small things on my phone, mainly in python... Sad thing is I don't have any idea what to code.

Give me your challenges (please), so I can keep mental health!

P.S: if anyone has a working way to use Node.js on Android, I'd be glad to take it :)

"Living" means choosing the challenges you take on.

wk83 for me like,

The one on the left is my Colleague from work for past 3 years. We have worked with each other on a dozen projects. Tough challenges all the way.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
And that thing on the right is `my friend`.

Code ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Friend

Can someone please write a plugin that automatically translates bug tickets into startup-ese? It would make it very easy to present the most common offenders to higher management on quarterly reviews.

Example:
-
$< "screen A is all messed up"
$> "We are disrupting the establishment in screen A"
-
$< "API B is not responding, giving timeout errors"
$> "We are facing logistical challenges in API B"

Building a range of services focused on providing information based on the users location.

It has amazing challenges. Although, I'm stumbling into some highly annoying problems which I don't know how to solve yet, its very awesome to see an idea I had come to life, slowly but surely and also the amount of stuff I learn throughout the process.

Also, it's awesome to see how one can build such services with near zero identifiable information collection!

Discovered CTF challenges a while ago, and let me just say that it is soooo rewarding when you find that damn flag. I'm proud of myself ^_^

!rant

I had a talk with my manager about my future role in the company. I had talked with him before about my interest to dive deeper in the technical side - rather than the business side, for which we have a higher dev demand.

The outcome is that I will work more closely with the senior devs on technical improvements and also tech strategy (e.g. implementation of code reviews). I will also advise the upcoming manager of the development team (who is coming from a PM position) on technical decisions. Lastly the roadmap for the company is to work more with cloud technology (azure), which is also going to be in my new duties.

I'm looking forward to these new challenges where I can improve myself on the technical side (yay!) rather than on the business side (which bored me).

Back on dev rant, been a while. Been two Jobs later...
Was extremely underpaid at the previous job.
Started a new venture two weeks ago. Long story short this company outsources their developers to other companies. The job I applied for is 'Junior Developer'. JUNIOR DEVELOPER!!!
Yet I'm being outsourced as an 'Intermediate Developer'.
Honestly I like the challenge, but businesses need to treat their employee's properly and not manipulate their young developers so they can get more money for cheap.
Really now, I've been dealing with this everywhere I go and it pisses me off.
On top of that I have no Senior Developer. I am the only developer. The other six, including my boss, are DBA's and don't know C#

Holy shit man...

I know its supposed to be hard but I cant ignore how much I want to give up right now.

I've been learning JS for months now, doing daily algorithm challenges, going strong on my freecodecamp dev map and still, I feel like I might no be cut out for this.

It's been more than a week now trying to implement a minimax algorithm into my tic tac toe game. I can't, for the life of me its just getting more frustrating by the day and its driving me crazy! How the fuck am I supposed to ever get a junior webdev job if I can't do something as simple as this!, And I keep reading and reading the theory but I cant implement it into my code! It just makes me want to quit (again)!

I really need to work on my attitude...

Relatively new to programming. I have worked with c++ for about 7 months, worked with c# in unity to make games, created lots of different scripts and other programs using bash, python, racket and Java for class.

I am looking to become a video game developer, I work with unity and do lots of coding challenges on hackerrank.com and some other stuff. But I am wondering what I should do to really improve and am wondering what some of the vets out there would tell me to do, what kinds of projects to create, how to get better at programming as and whole andnd knowing more about the subject in general. Any help is appreciated, I'm looking to start 2017 on the right track to success!

So we've had a new guy on our team for over 6 months now... Been training him up doing shadowing.... Training courses... Study time... The works...

He didn't have the specific skills for our team but had 2 degrees, lectured at uni... Seems VERY smart......

Yet he still has barely grasped the basics..... When experienced people talk about challenges they've had he tries to suggest what they do... Constantly raising 'problems' with ways of working but offers no solutions and never collaborates on how we can fix it......

He avoids doing practical learning and thinks he can learn the job from reading docs... .. Sigh....

Gone almost as far as doing daily check ups on what he's actually doing to make sure he's progressing..... Tough one to crack!

There is this docker guy in our enterprise.
Always, he is told there is a challenge in software operations, he brings up the solution "move it into a docker container and the challenge won‘t be a challenge anymore".

........

Don‘t get me wrong.

I love to use docker as a technology to host my apps.
But for me it is not the golden hammer technology which cures all dread diseases on this planet.

Sometimes it is just overhead for the solution of small challenges.

!Rant
Do you guys know any website that challenges​ you into coding little programs (for me, php) to solve problems ?
I mean, it would be to train my skills with actual kind of real world problems, not just hello worlds or simple "how-to" codes.

I signed up to a contest recently and I felt really dumb not to be able to find solutions faster or with more efficiency (FYI : I was ranked 1049/2300 all languages included :( )

Got into this compitition of Blind Code
Idea crazy a F!!!!

Mind prepared for something challengy! What I get? Greatest of 3 Nos in C... Poker Face😐

Confident a hell..With the monitor OFF, Ran down the keyboard on fire!

With the compilation result, BANG!
#include<iostream> instead of <stdio>.
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

My Mind BLINDED!

Imagine life as a Game,
Levels are Ages, if you have gotten older your level increases, and lifes getting easier and harder, easier with Knowledge and harder because of Diseases, challenges, kids etc...
Quests are life goals, such as having kids,
having a job, a family etc...
Side-Quests are jobs your getting from your boss, Jobs from Clients, Helping the Family, Cleaning your Room, etc..
Fast-Travel is Cars, Busses, Trains, Trams, etc... (Except in Germany)
and Last but not least,
Procastination, The End Boss of life, if you defeat Procastination you have beaten life... (But also died because the game is Over...)

My goals are:
1. Start my new job in Feb.
2. Overcome the challenges I will face in the new environment.
3. Learn, learn, learn
4. Don’t forget to rest.

Ooh. Here's a "deep" one.

For the self thought/online learners, at what point did you consider yourself an "actual" developer and felt ready to go out and apply for jobs and stuff?

And what challenges/reactions did you face?

Ugh, doing laundry sucks. Partially because the laundry area is adjacent to the living room and that makes it harder to hear stranger things, but mostly because it signals the end of the weekend. But I decided to be positive and share some positivity with you:

No matter what challenges you will face in the next week, you can do it. The Universe/God/The Flying Spaghetti Monster chose you to face the challenges because you can do. If the universe can believe in you, then so can I. And so should you. Get out there and rock fellow DevRanters!!!

Alright, buckle up, fellow developer, because we're about to embark on a thrilling journey through the world of code and creativity!

Listen up, you amazing code wizard, you're not just a developer. No, you're a digital architect, a creator of worlds in the virtual realm. You have the power to turn lines of code into living, breathing entities that can change lives and reshape industries.

In a world where everyone is a consumer, you are a producer. You build the bridges that connect our digital dreams to reality. You are a pioneer, an explorer in the vast wilderness of algorithms and frameworks. Your mind is the canvas, and code is your brushstroke.

Sure, there are challenges—bugs that refuse to be squashed, deadlines that seem impossible, and technology that evolves at warp speed. But guess what? You're not just a problem solver; you're a problem annihilator. You tackle those bugs with ferocity, you meet those deadlines with gusto, and you master that evolving technology like a maestro conducting a symphony.

You live for the 'Aha!' moments—the joy of cracking a complex problem, the thrill of seeing your creation come to life, the satisfaction of making a difference. You're a digital superhero, swooping in to save the day one line of code at a time.

And when things get tough—and they will—you dig deep. You summon that relentless determination that got you into coding in the first place. You remember why you started this journey—to innovate, to leave your mark, to change the world.

So, rise and shine, you coding genius! Embrace the challenges, learn from the failures, and celebrate the victories. You are a force to be reckoned with, a beacon of inspiration in a world that needs your brilliance.

Keep coding, keep creating, and keep being the rockstar developer that you are. The world eagerly awaits the magic you're about to unleash! Go and conquer the code-scape! 🚀💻

I have started doing one hour coding challenges... I try to make small projects in that time.. I have felt improvement in my programming and thinking skills but I wanna know your opinions if I am doing the right thing for the long run?
language: python, arcade library.

Ugh. Challenges. I need to create a 3D two player online game with the new HTML5 WebSockets, and I'm using a free 000webhost server which I barely have control over. Does anyone know how to connect two client connections together in PHP?

Title: "Wizard of Alzheimer's: Memories of Magic"

Setting:
You play as an elderly wizard who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. As your memories fade, so does your grasp on the magical world you once knew. You must navigate the fragmented and ever-changing landscapes of your own mind, casting spells and piecing together the remnants of your magical knowledge to delay the progression of the disease and preserve your most precious memories.

Gameplay:
1. Procedurally generated memories: Each playthrough generates a unique labyrinth of memories, representing different aspects and moments of your life as a wizard.

2. Memory loss mechanic: As you progress through the game, your memories will gradually fade, affecting your abilities, available spells, and the layout of the world around you.

3. Spell crafting: Collect fragments of your magical knowledge and combine them to craft powerful spells. However, as your memory deteriorates, you'll need to adapt your spellcasting to your changing abilities.

4. Mnemonic puzzles: Solve puzzles and challenges that require you to recall specific memories or piece together fragments of your past to progress.

5. Emotional companions: Encounter manifestations of your emotions, such as Joy, Fear, or Regret. Interact with them to gain insight into your past and unlock new abilities or paths forward.

6. Boss battles against Alzheimer's: Face off against physical manifestations of Alzheimer's disease, representing the different stages of cognitive decline. Use your spells and wits to overcome these challenges and momentarily push back the progression of the disease.

7. Memory anchors: Discover and collect significant objects or mementos from your past that serve as memory anchors. These anchors help you maintain a grasp on reality and slow down the rate of memory loss.

8. Branching skill trees: Develop your wizard's abilities across multiple skill trees, focusing on different schools of magic or mental faculties, such as Concentration, Reasoning, or Creativity.

9. Lucid moments: Experience brief periods of clarity where your memories and abilities are temporarily restored. Make the most of these moments to progress further or uncover crucial secrets.

10. Bittersweet ending: As you delve deeper into your own mind, you'll confront the inevitability of your condition while celebrating the rich magical life you've lived. The game's ending will be a poignant reflection on the power of memories and the legacy you leave behind.

In "Wizard of Alzheimer's: Memories of Magic," you'll embark on a deeply personal journey through the fragmented landscapes of a once-powerful mind. As you navigate the challenges posed by Alzheimer's disease, you'll rediscover the magic you once wielded, cherish the memories you hold dear, and leave a lasting impact on the magical world you've called home.

LMAO

Got some detailed feedback from Booking.com, upon asking.

I answered all the questions right. But they said I am not ready for a Sr PM role (which might be true).

Here are three points that I captured from the feedback:

1. Focus on details
2. Clear and better reasoning for WHY
3. Realistic over idealistic scenarios

While it makes me feel low that I didn't make it but this feedback will surely help me overcome the challenges and clear interviews in future.

On to the next one now. Let's see what comes my way..

One thing for sure, there is lots and lots to learn for me yet.

One thing I surely lack is articulating my thoughts and keeping things crisp while conveying the information aptly.

Anyone has any tips/resources on how to improve in this area?

Started using Solo learn yesterday. Must say i quite simple and good for beginners. Not advanced.But the challenges are interesting. Just hope there were more apps like his

Playing in hackerrank and they do not have ruby in one of the "30 days of code" challenges.. I had to do it in php .. it took me nearly 40 minutes, fucking PHP I hate it.

Yeah, ok thanks...

Any good sites a self-educator can do some challenges? Heard of Kaggle and Hackerrank today, but haven't checked them out by now.
Would like to do some in Python and C/C++

Thanks in advance and by the way a really nice app with fun people here!

Tonight's checklist:
1. Study a chapter in ISLR
2. Try to understand source code of an open source project in GoLang.
3. Complete programming challenges on HackerRank

What I am going to end up doing:
1. Watching videos of The Rock trolling others.
2. Watch Family Guy

Ive been thinking for a few now that if like to begin a social program to get old people to play computer games.

They are often bored as fuck， cant move much and have no mental challenges.

I mean what else than video games could save the day?

Old homes with puzzles and missing pieces. Dementia neighbours. Ots a no brainer!

I'm very sad. I had to do 5 challenges in Hackerrank for a job and I managed to complete only 1 in the allotted time.
What makes me sadder is that in one challenge, the testing the compiler did was different than the challenge description (getting me failed tests).
Damned job hunting, I'm losing hope with each passing day... 🙁

Biggest hurdle in my Dev career?
To be as good an architect as the developer I am.
Challenges: You'll have to convince fellow architects, business clients, junior developers, mid level developers. Some understands UML, some only wants POC, some wants to see code, some just wants a PowerPoint deck, and some just wants to see the cost benefits only.

Part of my job requires me to use SQL in SQL Server and databases and Python and utilising Javascript APIs - so I was thrown in at the deep end. But my fiancé is also an amazing help as a software engineer he helps to spot my errors and encourages me to take on new challenges.

When starting a new project full of challenges, do not go to your technicians right away; go to your artists first - they will know what to do. Then go to your engineers - because they will figure out how to do it.

today i said i had holiday until the new year and wouldn't open a code editor until then

and here i am 5 hours later looking at advent of code challenges, trying to do them in rust

🤓🤡🤓🤡🤓🤡🤓🤡🤓🤡🤓🤡🤓🤡

also screw them for discouraging AI. if a tool can help me learn a new language faster i'm using it

Today I completed my first user story as a developer, an feature to edit and update comments posted. It passed the test too.

I'm proud of myself about the achieving this given my actually development experience is very minimal :)

More challenges to conquer..

Thanks

The ultimate distraction:

Programming challenges

`WeChall`,
`Project Euler`,
`The Python programming challenge`,
Etc.

So I was doing some hackerrank challenges when I completed a challenge that kept me thinking for a lot.
In the moment I finished, no electricity in my home for a brief time. No internet. No submission.
This was destiny.

Thirty birds went on a journey to find their god Simurgh whose name was set in stone. After insane challenges and hardships they found out that the word Simurgh meant "thirty birds".

To create an abstraction simple enough to make complex business logic challenges solvable for non programmers.

The issue I see today is programmers solving problems they don't understand as well as the user. I think two ways might be taken:
- Programmers specialize in other fields and solve problems there
- Other professionals create their own software

Both will happen in the future (IMHO) and I want to help the second happening.

Note: Excel does this really well, but I think we can so quite better today.

When you're motivated by technical challenges but only receive organisational challenges.

Get younger. I like challenges :)

From interviewee's point of view, how does doing HackerRank challenges for 3h sound to you as the 1st step of the process?
Too early? Should it even be in the process?

Working from home is still not without its challenges. I’ve been doing it for 6 years. Today I solved the dilemma of how my wife can book her own events where I’m needed to watch the kids during the day. A simple hashtag in the calendar description and an IFTTT recipe now adds a “Busy” block to my work calendar.

This is the reason I will never be with IT: I recently got hired as an IT assistant at my college. I was in charge of solving issues in an entire building actually. I was so excited to be able to go around to resolve and troubleshoot problems with people's computers. The responsibility and pay were good, but the fact that people had next to no problems, but I had to be in the same room with students during virtual tests and lessons just in case. I had to stand in the same spot for 2.5 hours watching people take a test. Whenever they DID have a problem, they just had to refresh the page! People gotta learn that I don't have to be in the room in order for people to decide basic troubleshooting. Extremely boring and tiring. No challenges and barely any problem-solving. This is why I'm on Devrant and not Fixrant.

So this guy, was my teacher in college, and he started involving me in projects outside school, after that he recommended me to my current employer and is currently a guy I consider my personal friend. But the hest thing is that he has never cuf me some slack, he always challenges me to understand the why of the how haha, I can actually say that I have gotten to where I am because of him

FUCK

Anyone here who graduated in industrial sector engineering fields but managed to switch their careers towards IT/development? Considering that I do have related competences and solid foundations on 2/3 languages.

My job fucking sucks. The pay is good but I'm not doing shit since 2 weeks. Everyone works superslow because there is no shit to do and boredom kills us slowly. My family says that I just need to be assigned to a project and be patient. I don't want a super fast no free time environment, but if there are no challenges any single day what is even the point of getting up in the morning.

It's FUCKING depressing :(

So here are my goals for 2019 in no particular order:
-contribute to open source
-switching from intellij to vscode
-learn vim
-finish side projects
-live a healthier lifestyle (less meat, quality food)
-more DevOps
-do some hacking challenges
-learn proper linux system administration

Just remembered that I still had a foobar invite link in my email inbox 😋

The challenges are odd though, first challenge was super easy (basically an idiot check), but while I was able to convert 3 cans of energy drink into a functional solution in half an hour, the verification utility is not very verbose at all. So in Python 3.7.3 in my Debian box it worked just fine, yet the testing suite in Foobar was failing the whole time. After sending an email to my friend that gave the link (several years ago now, sorry about that! 😅) asking if he knew the problem, I found out that Google is still using Python 2.7.13 for some reason. Even Debian's Python is newer, at 2.7.16. To be fair it does still default to Python 2 too. But why.. why on Earth would you use Python 2.7 in a developer oriented set of challenges from a massive company, in 2020 when Python 2 has already been dead for almost a whole year?

But hey now that it's clear that it's Python 2.7, at least the next challenges should be a bit easier. Kind of my first time developing in SnekLang regardless actually, while the language doesn't have everything I'd expect (such as integer square root, at least not in Debian or the foobar challenge's interpreter), its math expressions are a lot cleaner than bash's (either expr or bc). So far I kinda like the language. 2-headed snake though and there's so much garbage for this language online, a lot more than there is for bash. I hate that. Half the stuff flat out doesn't work because it was written by someone who requires assistance to breathe.

Meh, here's to hoping that the next challenges will be smooth sailing :) after all most of the time spent on the first one (17.5 hours) was bottling up a solution for half an hour, tearing my hair out for a few hours on why Google's bloody verification tool wouldn't accept my functioning code (I wrote it for Python 3, assuming that that's what Google would be using), and 10 hours of sleep because no Google, I'm not scrubbing toilets for 48 hours. It's fair to warn people but no, I'm not gonna work for you as a cleaning lady! 😅

Other than the issues that the environment has, it's very fun to solve the challenges though. Fuck the theoretical questions with the whiteboard, all hiring processes should be like this!

Gonna give up on Advent of code.
I know I'm not really a programmer and while I had fun solving the challenges so far it feels I fail to translate the idea of solution into working code. i.e. I know how it should be working, but when diving into the code I'm losing focus and getting lost in the functionality.
It was also good reality check of my skill level when a task took me 50 min while TOP100 is below 10. Can't really fit the time it takes me to come up with a solution with other activities I should actually be doing.

Do you make popcorn because you want to eat it...

Or because you want to see if you can pop all the corn?

Fighting what I call "FTS" (Fuck This Shit) syndrome.

Most of my mistakes or challenges caused to my future self can be attributed to succumbing to FTS.

As a linux and hacking beginner, I am amazed how much I learn about linux while looking for ways to solve hacking challenges.

It is like learning something while learning some other thing. (Yeah I like learning)

What about devRant start monthly dev challenges and winners gets Freebies tech stuff jobs and other shit

My best tool for avoiding procrastination and getting a lot of focus is having a job with a great work culture in which I get to work on a project that challenges me and makes me learn new stuff. When it's not like that, I tend to lose energy and that sends me straight to devRant and other sources of distraction.

Me: "We seriously have an issue with staff engagement and motivation. Programmers must be given more challenges, they need to be creative, to innovate...

Boss: "Sure, but we can only do the fun things if it does not impede the Business As Usual."

!rant

I've got a question for everyone as we are all in the same realm. How do you handle working for a company who provides no motivation, very little challenges, horrible pay, incompetent developers, and completely useless management?

Also, no other opportunities in the area. Literally. So, "change companies" wouldn't really be a viable option.

Got an invite for Google foobar challenge.
Successful completed 2 challenges.

It is so much fun to work on complex problem especially with a time bomb attached to it.

Is knowing how to solve code challenges and whiteboard interviews normal?

Recently started reading about how businesses startup and grow. As much as I hate to admit it, their problems seem more daunting than technical challenges developers face. The nature of problems is so much more dynamic, unstructured and nuanced. After all, leading strangers to work towards your personal vision is kinda neat!

Okay I'm back to Dev Rant tho it still looks new and confusing sometimes, maybe because I'm new to programming world. Well I need some type of advice , I like web development, I started learning PHP (I know it an old language but it all I can help myself with, by learning). Is there any thing I'm missing? Any link on improving my skills ?

I will be glad to learn a lot from the senior developers on here . I really want to go wide into programming I'm ready for the challenges because I know the path isn't always easy!!

Thanks in advance

Has anyone taken filteredai interview test?
I have an invite that I'm planning to reject because while I might be a commodity to the company I don't want to feel like one.

The process is ridiculous to say the least. I'm supposed to record answers on video for a couple of questions, take another couple of programming challenges and then fucking record myself explaining the code.
And that's not enough. I need to 'authenticate' with my social media creds like LinkedIn for instance. Oh and I also need to install a Firefox extension for the interview.

The hell? I checked out their website (filteredai's) and they claim that they cut down on interview costs and hiring time. It's a fucking shitty way of achieving that. I'm not a cam model ffs.

What about some fun coding challenges?

That moment when you have no sporty friends and you tryna add yourself lol.

Is anyone here who is up for sport challenges via the Samsung Health app?

PS: I was using the freeletics app a few years ago, but that wasn't helpful, too.

A developer in my team just implemented a new design from a screenshot. Because the copy of the app isn't written in his native language he had written the copy from the screenshot letter by letter.

I told him I was really impressed with his work (almost no errors!), but to me it was unacceptable that he should have to go through all this trouble. I also told him that next time he could ask me to write down the copy for him (it's written in my native language).

So I'm curious: who else here is programming for apps that aren't written in your own language, and what are the challenges you face? Also: how can I help the developers in my team with this?

More people have access to a mobile phone than to a toilet. More than 60 prototype solutions were built in response to 113 water sector challenges defined.....Shiit!! Risk is falling asleep at a hackathon- especially when there are permanent maker pens around.

The feeling that every work day is composed of new challenges that help you to grow and learn more. Also, how cool is it when your code works as intended and with no ramifications on the first try? Last but not least how many people can say that what they do at work is their true passion?

Hi I just joined this great Community and here is my thoughts about programming tap "++" if you agree if not then change your mind.

For me programming is like becoming wizard of next generation. Like wizard you can control or create anything because in future you will find electronics containing programs written by a wizard (programmer). We are not people who can repair computer but greater then that because a pc is just a box without programs (software)
You are reading this article because you loves challenges and you are hard working too.

Being a Dutch developer & student I'd love to seek new challenges and participate in coding events and Hackathons. Seeing as Devrant has so many amazing developers from The Netherlands around, any suggestions where I could go and find information about such events?

Functional Programming being touted as the silver bullet for all types of modern programming challenges.

Why? As far as I can tell, it doesn't deliver. Sure certain approaches help with specific kinds of problems. Yet, it is cumbersome for general purpose problems and downright harmful for performance critical problems. For doing math problems it is great and I see value. For most else, eh, I have work to do.

!rant

Had a dyslexic girl on my team doing Javascript for a few weeks, it was brutal to see her struggle with finding the errors the typing caused and even point them out to her when helping. She eventually quit our team and joined a Java team.

Anyone here with dyslexia doing programming? What language and what is your greatest challenges compared to your colleagues apart from the obvious?

I guess you could say that my speciality is cloud at scale. I’d say it chose me more than I chose it.
Looking back on it though, I think what I like about my speciality is the unique challenges it brings.
Every speciality has its own set of challenges, like tight resource limits in embedded, or client-server synchronisation in native/mobile.

The challenge of cloud at scale is throughput. Designing systems that can support 100K users making a bazillion requests a second, or a data pipeline firing events that you need to process in near real time without dropping a single one.
The real challenge of course is doing all this within a sensible budget. We have virtually infinite compute but we dont have infinite dollars to spend on it.

Its a fun problem to solve.

I can't find a website I used years ago... maybe someone here remembers its name.

It was a place with daily code challenges, real time code battles, you had to fix bugs, syntax errors, you could choose different programming languages, and receive points based on the number of chars used to fix the issue, etc.

I hope it still exsits, it was really fun.

Thanks in advance!

Changing jobs. I found something different, with new challenges. My current job still challenges me, but I feel it's constantly similar stuff, just in different flavors.

My current company is asking me to stay longer than for my 3-month notice. They say it's too rapid and I should have told them earlier that I'm looking for a new job. Is it even true? Do people do this?

Should I stay? I really like the guys and I don't want to put them in a difficult situation but at the same time the argument about my decision being too rapid seems weak. Our team is over 30 people, it won't suffer THAT much. They will probably offer me a higher salary, but going against my feeling just for the money seems... kinda wrong. What do you think?

I got job as security analyst. And I am fresher. Any advice?

Make EVERY course have programming exercises\challenges.

I want a game that teaches you engineering by presenting challenges you have to design something to overcome.

!rant
I am teaching some friends python, so i would you comment here challenges to do in it (eg. Python TicTacToe). All difficulties would be appreciated.

Programming is life ❤️
Just as life, it has it's ups and downs, but it's truly satisfying to create complex systems and get them to actually work and be useful to others.
We have only just started with the digitalisation of previously manual, tedious tasks. Imagine what all this saved time and labour could bring us to achieve in areas we haven't yet had the time to explore.
I hope mankind is ready for the ongoing and upcoming challenges regarding data privacy and security.

Nah, in reality, we will be stuck with Fakebook and Tweeter selling all our dickpics to *in Trump voice* "Chiner" and censoring unpopular opinion and discourse.
These "digital parasites" can all go sit on a rusty spike.

Damn. 3days and not yet finished with this bug.

Problem: in js, we want to popup a dialog to user that he us living the page.

So we used onbeforeunload.

Works well with chrome, ie and firefox (atfirst).

Then i updated my firefox to latest version and onbeforeunload is not triggering.

And it also occurs in tablet. Argh! Damn challenges on cross platform/browser compatibilities.

Help! Please

If a team of two counts, did some hackthebox challenges, wrote some funny scripts, found a way to using nodejs as an attack vector.
Fun

Just a strong feel and will to pursue it! As the time passed by it became stronger.

Even in the challenges, when you find fun and happiness and satisfaction of after achieving it... that's what proves constantly.. as if....

Just heard today that our team's senior dev might be leaving soon after fresh challenges and opportunities. I'm happy for them, but it's sad to think about that they won't be around soon anymore..

Does anyone know of a good place for coding challenges? I want to keep practicing my coding, but I'm terrible at coming up with projects.

When you’re frustrated and think you need another developers help, exhaust all of your resources before you ask. Google it, look for similar functionality in the app to mimic, ruminate for a hour. We are all working through challenges.

Playing around with GW-BASIC on an old 286 when I was maybe 8 I knew that I would spend my life programming. It was magic. It's less magic now, but I know I will not run out of challenges in my life or career, and that's pretty good too :)

Am I too dumb if I do not understand good-first-issues on open source projects? I mean, I completed C++ Primer book. Tried to find a real world challenges to use my knowledge.

I look at those issues but I really can understand em, when they belong to a project with tens of modules etc. Maybe good-first-issue is for people who spends 20 hours just to understand project, before writing a single line of code.

Soooo I have been taking my learning experience to Hackerrank.com, so that I can give myself some training with actual problems to solve instead of all theory, and today I'm working on one of the Challenges, and and I'm slowly getting it and working at it, then im looking at the code and think man I can clean this up a bit and merge things and make it look pretty! So I slave away and making it look pretty and stuff. I look at the code, all 70 lines of code and I'm so happy with my work. I pressed submit, of course I passed it! I had made sure every bit of my code made sense... After I finish and am so happy, I decide to take a look at what other people answered......

While my answer was 70 lines of code, almost everybody else's was AT MOST 18-20 lines of code!! Uggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Makes me feel like I got a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONGGGGGGGGGG way to go...

I'm not that into open source contributions, but the hacktoberfest campaign this year caught my attention. There are so many challenges and events happening... I thought I should give it a try.

So far I got 2 t-shirts and had more fun than I thought.

I love Typescript's challenges. Today I had to make a generic interface that replaces every property in its parameter with either itself, a promise of itself or a different property keyed `obtain${key}` which is a function returning either the value or a promise of it. Not a very difficult challenge, but it was very satisfying to solve.
If anyone has the patience to attempt it I'm very curious what more experienced type theorists than myself come up with.

Anyone know any challenges or training sessions, by some development firm or company that send us goodies upon finishing them? I stumbled upon a similar one by Google, the 30 Days on GCP challenge.

I used to be deeply in love with programming and IT, I keep teaching myself language and tricks and I’m always enthusiastic of new challenges but since I saw a video of GitHub Copilot this Saturday I feel stuck in a rut. I used to find programming and IT skills which differentiated me from many of my peers but now it doesn’t feel special anymore, just glorified typing which can be replaced by a robot anytime in the future, my motivation is destroyed.

Is it worthy to spend so much time solving hacker rank, codility, code chef challenges or just learning new technologies and becoming good a t it? At the end, where should we put our energy on?

Very vague and large question but: How do you become better in terms of software development / engineering?

For context my current job is pretty good but sometimes it lacks challenges, I’m interested in how people become better out of the work scope I guess.

I took a hakerRank challenge for an interview, I failed miserably.

All challenges included subsequences and I just kept reaching memory limit... My algorithm gets the answer, if just takes forever if the input is too large.

So fuck stupid me.
I am now googling about it but can not find something that explains it clear (in my opinion)

Would appreciate if you guys can recommend some resources.

A mac challenges a pc to an arm wrestle…

How do you deal with your juniors when they do any mistakes? Do you praise them when they overcome any challenges they were facing? Do you blame them rather correcting them? Do you balance both praise and blame to them? Just curious. 😅

just a quick rant to express my HATRED towards java.

Today I played minecraft a bit to release some stree (plis dont tell anybody xD)

FUCKING HELL

1) Java boasts with its portability. Except it doesnt even have a proper runtime for linux
2) ITS SUPER SLOW
3) FAHCKING HELL it's so broken when you start with custom hardware (might be the fault of Gl tho)

^^ those points dont list the horrors of coding in it. I have already accomplished some coding challenges in it, and I know it to be an epitome of misery

A very long rant.. but I'm looking to share some experiences, maybe a different perspective.. huge changes at the company.

So my company is starting our microservices journey (we have a 359 retail websites at this moment)

First question was: What to build first?

The first thing we had to do was to decide what we wanted to build as our first microservice. We went looking for a microservice that can be used read only, consumers could easily implement without overhauling production software and is isolated from other processes.

We’ve ended up with building a catalog service as our first microservice. That catalog service provides consumers of the microservice information of our catalog and its most essential information about items in the catalog.

By starting with building the catalog service the team could focus on building the microservice without any time pressure. The initial functionalities of the catalog service were being created to replace existing functionality which were working fine.

Because we choose such an isolated functionality we were able to introduce the new catalog service into production step by step. Instead of replacing the search functionality of the webshops using a big-bang approach, we choose A/B split testing to measure our changes and gradually increase the load of the microservice.

Next step: Choosing a datastore

The search engine that was in production when we started this project was making user of Solr. Due to the use of Lucene it was performing very well as a search engine, but from engineering perspective it lacked some functionalities. It came short if you wanted to run it in a cluster environment, configuring it was hard and not user friendly and last but not least, development of Solr seemed to be grinded to a halt.

Elasticsearch started entering the scene as a competitor for Solr and brought interesting features. Still using Lucene, which we were happy with, it was build with clustering in mind and being provided out of the box. Managing Elasticsearch was easy since there are REST APIs for configuration and as a fallback there are YAML configurations available.

We decided to use Elasticsearch since it provides us the strengths and capabilities of Lucene with the added joy of easy configuration, clustering and a lively community driving the project.

Even bigger challenge? Which programming language will we use

The team responsible for developing this first microservice consists out of a group web developers. So when looking for a programming language for the microservice, we went searching for a language close to their hearts and expertise. At that time a typical web developer at least had knowledge of PHP and Javascript.

What we’ve noticed during researching various languages is that almost all actions done by the catalog service will boil down to the following paradigm:

- Execute a HTTP call to fetch some JSON

- Transform JSON to a desired output

- Respond with the transformed JSON

Actions that easily can be done in a parallel and asynchronous manner and mainly consists out of transforming JSON from the source to a desired output. The programming language used for the catalog service should hold strong qualifications for those kind of actions.

Another thing to notice is that some functionalities that will be built using the catalog service will result into a high level of concurrent requests. For example the type-ahead functionality will trigger several requests to the catalog service per usage of a user.

To us, PHP and .NET at that time weren’t sufficient enough to us for building the catalog service based on the requirements we’ve set. Eventually we’ve decided to use Node.js which is better suited for the things we are looking for as described earlier. Node.js provides a non-blocking I/O model and being event driven helps us developing a high performance microservice.

The leap to start programming Node.js is relatively small since it basically is Javascript. A language that is familiar for the developers around that time. While Node.js is displaying some new concepts it is relatively easy for a developer to start using it.

The beauty of microservices and the isolation it provides, is that you can choose the best tool for that particular microservice. Not all microservices will be developed using Node.js and Elasticsearch. All kinds of combinations might arise and this is what makes the microservices architecture so flexible.

Even when Node.js or Elasticsearch turns out to be a bad choice for the catalog service it is relatively easy to switch that choice for magic ‘X’ or component ‘Z’. By focussing on creating a solid API the components that are driving that API don’t matter that much. It should do what you ask of it and when it is lacking you just replace it.

Many more headaches to come later this year ;)

Hello fellow ranters ,
A few weeks ago we started working from home because of the Coronavirus, I have personally found it very hard to perform at work and have lost all motivation to do anything other than the bare minimum required by the company , around a week ago we were officially furloughed , my question to you guys is : what are some things I can do to exercise my brain and make sure my skills stay sharp, I am a JavaScript , node.js dev , I’m talking coding challenges and other things , also can anyone else relate ?

Hacking events, I always go then gather the team in the event place with team-less people.
Making new friends, having some fun, and solving some challenges.
By the way, I couldn't get a girlfriend using my coding skills, it is not working.

What are the challenges of using standard Linux on phones, perhaps with a phone-optimized desktop environment?

Sometimes we have setbacks, but the problems you face define who you are and what you are able to overcome. These include any issue with life. The challenges you once faced 5 years ago are nothing to the you that is now - keep up the good work :)

Yesterday I was invited to Google's Foobar Challenge. I just solved the level 1 problem which was simple. I don't have a CS degree nor am I studying for one. A lot of posts on Reddit and Medium suggest that you won't be able to get through the latter challenges if you don't have extensive knowledge about CS concepts. May someone guide me in the right direction?

I think motivation and constant improvement are the biggest challenges, but I guess these are applicable to life in general. On a dev prespective one of the biggest challenges was the jump from college work to job work. The professional environment brings some responsibilities that in college you just don't have. Good side, in most cases, when you get home you don't have to think about it.

I'm a full time lead developer, but I want a extra challenges etc. Does anyone know a good site etc, which you can do a few hours freelance or group projects​?

Me and my coworkers are going to have a weekend "gamejam"/hackathon starting tonight but we can't think of any good challenges to try and code - can you guys come up with something we can try and tackle in a weekend?

Comment best sources for coding challenges.

Has anyone played around with kaggle.com to get into data science?

I’m good with data, good with analytics and good with programming but I need to combine those skills and learn whatever I’m missing.

Kaggle came up and it seems to have some nice data sets and challenges to do.

Thought?

I want to start a devRoulette project: basically something telling you what to code, in what language, and with some challenges if specified. Feel free to put your suggestions here :)

NEW: @SADAVA, who has been bashed quite a lot for their initiative of building demos for my project, didn't mean harm. In fact, I might consider a collab, so yeah :)

It’s my friend’s birthday. He doesn’t code much, but to encourage him I made him a series of programming challenges.
I hope he finds it fun.

Right know, the biggest challenges when taking a new task are not learning the tool or framework or language, no...

The biggest challenge is how to integrate it with the burocratic and undoccumented in-house software and tools of my company.

Is it the same for you?? Should I start my job hunting already??

I’ve been looking for a job recently since I am a student and starting my career.

I have a bunch of experience and I like to think I have pretty broad knowledge of programming concepts (web dev, ML, AI, software development).

I see these job postings for jobs that I know I am qualified for.

- I got my research published (which is related to the jobs I’ve been applying for)
- I have great grades
- I have a clear track record of doing well in teams (life long athlete)
- I am a complete geek for new tech and libraries so I always learn them super fast
- I have side projects that aren’t just shit I’ve done in school
- my past jobs show that I am an efficient worker who has real experience

However, I always fucking fail the coding challenges.

I’m never asked questions like “how to reverse a linked list”, just obscure questions that I don’t know how to study for.

What the fuck am I supposed to do? It’s not even like I get close to the answers. I usually get a couple test cases and then fail the rest of them, or I can’t figure out a solution to solve them.

This is all really disheartening and I fucking hate it I absolutely fucking hate it and when I am trying to hire people in the future, I’m never going to make them do coding challenges bc they’re fucking stupid

Been going on some interviews recently and realized I'm not the best at interview style coding challenges. I was wondering if there's a good app/website with coding challenges to solve, or even a game? Preferably using JavaScript or Python.

Anyone here made a change from a QA background to a Mobile Dev or just regular dev? Any tips for a QA looking to ditch the field soon.

I’m an automation QA bit still feeling like the coding challenges are not enough.

I've been asked to write a job ad for a frontend developer, as I have never don that, what would you write in there? And what are usual salaries for frontend devs? Also what would you ask them in an interview? What kind of coding challenges would you give them? Also we're not looking for a "code monkey" only but that person should also be responsible for jow everything looks (like the design and UI/UX of the site). How would you call that position? I've for now put "Frontend UI/UX Web-Developer" there.