wtorek, 12 lipca 2011

FizzBuzz of Doom

Today a colleague had to interview a bunch of students (on their 3rd or 4th year at the university I believe) wanting to have their internship at our company. Just before he went to talk to them I mentioned the FizzBuzz problem (huh?) as a nice example of simple screening questions and he decided to ask it the candidates.
When I first heard about it I couldn't really believe this could be a problem for anyone (I suppose I was on my 3rd year of studies at the time). Today I got a hard proof I was terribly wrong. Out of 6 students only 2 gave an acceptable answer to the problem.

Ouch! I don't really know what to think about it. Thought that FizzBuzz can actually be a problem for CS students makes me feel uneasy. Or maybe there's nothing to worry about? Time will show

wtorek, 5 lipca 2011

Coding kata

Before yesterday I have done a coding kata (what is it? a short programming exercise that you will ideally perform daily, write some code and throw it away - for more detailed explanation see here) and decided to start doing it daily. It was Roy Osherove's TDD kata 1 .On Sunday I've done it in Java, took be about 20 minutes to complete it (including the advanced part). Yesterday I did it again, this time in Python.
I have learned a bit of Python while studying, done a couple of simple networking apps in it (curses-based IM, Tkinter mail client etc), but that's where my adventure with this fine language ended. Since then I've used it only for small scripts to handle boring tasks, and eventually my knowledge of it has faded.
The basic scope of the String Calculator kata took me 1h to complete! I felt quite ashamed of my performance so decided to re-learn Python. There's a couple of different katas I want to try (including Uncle Bob's Bowling Kata), and have downloaded JetBrains' PyCharm IDE to get a decent tooling support (especially documentation, as I have forgotten most of the standard Python library functions). The experience I had with it yesterday was satisfying and I think I will continue evaluating it and learning Python in the process.
Hopefully I have enough self-discipline to do it!