I have found this to be a semi controversial topic. Its almost becoming a required point for getting a new job to have open source work that you can show. Some people just enjoy working on programming side projects and others don't want to do any more after they leave the office.

Whats your opinion on this? Do you work on any side projects? Do you think its reasonable for interviewers to look for open source work when hiring?

Previous challenges

It's time for another coding challenge!

This challenge isn't mine, it's this challenge (year 5, season 3, challenge 3) by ČVUT FIKS.

The task is to design a network communication protocol. You're sending large amount of bits over the network. The problem is that network is not perfect and the message sometimes arrives corrupted. Design a network protocol, that will guarantee that the decoded message will be exactly same as the message that was encoded.

MESSAGE => (encoding) => message corrupted => (decoding) => MESSAGE

Corruption

Transmitting the message might corrupt it and introduce errors. Each error in a message (there might be more than one error in a single message) will flip all following bits of the message.

Example:

011101 => 011|010

(| is place where an error occured).

There might be more than one error in a message, but there are some rules:

• Minimum distance between two errors in a single message is k

• Number of bits between two errors is always odd number

According to these rules, describe a communication protocol, that will encode a message, and later decode message with errors.

Bonus

• Guarantee your protocol will work always - even when errors are as common as possible

• Try to make the protocol as short as possible.

Hello everyone! It has been a while since last programming challenge, it's time for another one!

This week's goal would be to build your own interpreter.

Interpreter is program that receives input and executes it. For example Python is interpreted language, meaning you are actually writing instructions for the interpreter, which does the magic.

Probably the easiest interpereter to write is Brainfuck interpreter. If someone here doesn't know, Brainfuck is programming language, which contains following instructions: ,.<>[]-+. Other characters are ignored. It has memory in form of array of integers. At the start, pointer that points to one specific memory cell points to cell 0. We can use < to move pointer to left (decrement) and > to move pointer to right (increment). . can be used to print value of cell the pointer is currently pointing to (ascii). , can be used to read one character from stdin and write it to memory. [ is beggining of loop and ] is end of loop. Loops can be nested. Loop is terminated when we reach ] character and current value in memory is equal to 0. - can be used to decrement value in memory by 1 and + can be used to increment value in memory by 1. Here's Hello World:

++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<
-]>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<++++++++++++
+++.>.+++.------.--------.>+.>.

People with nothing to do today can attemp to make an interpreter for the Taxi programming language.

You can even make your own language! There are no limits for this challenge.

I'm looking for a cheap small factor mechanical keyboard. I love the looks of XD64 or a JJ50. How do i go about it? I Don't want the numpad, don't care about leds and prefer more retro/sober styles than the ones with wings and dragons and lasers blazing across the keys.

I live in Brazil, so i'll have to import everything. I'm looking to buy everything from one place if possible.

I was looking at KPrepublic. What do i need for the xd64?

1. Plastic case
2. Key caps
3. XD64 PCB with gateron switchs (Kit 10)

Do i need plate and stabilizers? It's already $91 without it. If it's necessary, i think it would be a better idea to just buy a Durgod Taurus k320 since it's cheaper.

What do you guys think?

EDIT: Got a Magicforce 68 for $47. Thanks for the help!