What is Code Fights

Today I stumbled across CodeFights, a competitive setting for programming problems. You face off against another player, and then have 3 minutes to read a problem, understand the code and fix the bug that has been inserted.

I find time pressure locks me down hard and keeps me from thinking clear, so it’s a challenge to keep a cool head, and I feel I’m getting better at it. I recommend signing up and then adding me as CodeFriend so we can fight!

What is Kattis

I’ve been hard at work learning PHP, and found this website, Kattis. It’s a collection of programming problems which you can submit answers to in a bunch of different languages. If you successfully solve the problem you get points and your ranking goes up. If you fail, you usually beat yourself up and go bughunting.

Since Kattis is mainly built around textual input and output, it’s very important that you nail the format of the output perfectly. It took me half an hour to figure out why I got the reusult “Wrong Answer” for this problem when I thought my execution was flawless: Instead of outputting “Emma”, I was outputting “Emmma”.

Buuuuuuug!

Common denominator

There are now tons of sites around focused on learning and practicing coding skills, like Codeacademy, Coderbyte and the aforementioned sites. The thing I feel is lacking on most these places are the depth: I would like to see some bigger challenges, more project-like, that requires some serious object oriented programming to solve efficiently.