It's often the case that in academic and self-teaching environments, you don't really have the opportunity to grasp and fully understand situations in which a problem has multiple valid solutions and what the implications are in choosing among them. Among those considerations are two in particular: runtime efficiency and maintainability. When these subjects are discussed, the example solutions are often comical at best, or the problems themselves too complex to fully grasp the situation at hand. Sometimes the problems are also so simple as to be completely worthless, e.g. comparing bubble sort to bogo sort.

As such, I would like to take this opportunity to discuss practical but conceptually simple problems and the implications of the different solutions that are available. Conceptual simplicity is an absolute requirement because we want these problems to be accessible to a wider variety of readers. Problems don't necessarily need to be code-related (you could e.g. discuss something related to server administration). Bonus points for problems that include solutions with an efficiency/maintainability trade-off!

Hi folks,

I figured this would be a good place to ask a rather simple question.

Where do I start to learn to code?

I'm in high school, so I have (some) time to dedicate to it, and it seems there are a plethora of websites/resources out there, so I ask: what do you recommend, and why has it worked for you? I have no prior experience. I believe that this would really help out in the long run, as I will graduate high school with an Associate's Degree in Business. Thank you!

EDIT: Thank you for all your responses! I'll start with Python and move on from there. You guys have been a great help, and I'll vote you up or reply.

I've seen the programming challenges on ~comp as well as quite a few users who are interested in getting started with programming. I thought it would be interesting to post some 'mini-challenges' that all could have a go at. I'm certain that many of you might find these pretty straight forward, but I still think there's merit in sharing different approaches to simple problems, including weird-and-wonderful ones.

This is my first post and I'm a maths-guy who dabbles in programming, so I'm not promising anything mind-blowing. If these gain any sort of traction I'll post some more.

Starting of with...

TicTacToeBot

Info

You will be writing code for a programme that will check to see if a player has won a game of tic-tac-toe.

Input

The input will be 9 characters that denote the situation of each square on the grid.

• 'X' represents the X-player has moved on that square.
• 'O' represents the O-player has moved on that square.
• '#' represents that this square is empty.

Example:

|O| |X|
|X|X|O|    The input for this grid will be O#XXXOO##
|O| | |

Output

The expected output is the character representing the winning player, or "#" if the game is not won.

(e.g. The expected output for the example above is '#' since no player has won)

I have been looking for some software where I can brain dump all the things I need to remember on a constant basis so I can easily find it again in the future. A personal wiki basically. I am wondering what any of you tilderians are using?

The things I am looking for:

Absolute requirements:

• Open Source: I want to be in control of the data myself, and I want to be able to hack on it myself as the need arises.
• Self Hostable: Goes hand-in-hand with with open sourceness, I want the data to live on the server in my apartment, under my own control.
• An API of some sort so I can programmatically add/read/modify data.

Nice to haves:

• Revision history of some sort.
• Common/simple data format for easy backup and longevity.
• Web interface, with mobile compatibility.
• Lightweight as possible, so I can run it on a low powered server.

Does anything know anything like that?

Options I have heard of:

• TiddlyWiki
• DokuWiki
• MediaWiki
• ZIM
• Emacs with Org Mode

Here is a previous discussion on the topic @ Lobste.rs

When I started working with development teams 3 years ago, I started learning all about agile and scrum. I'm currently a product manager working with two dev teams that loosely follow scrum. Since we don't have an official scrum master, I somewhat fill that role too. I've done my best to learn as much as I can about it and so far I'm a big fan. However I feel like most of the things I hear about it are from the scrum and agile community, which means I don't hear too many negatives. What's your experience with these been and if you were in the right position, how would you try to structure people to produce software?

I'd imagine that this website probably has an above average linux user percentage, considering that one of the main principles of tildes is to respect your privacy.

Personally I use fedora. I started with windows, than moved to ubuntu when windows 10 came out. I tried a few others and settled on fedora because I wanted an operating system with a quicker package update cycle than debian, but I wanted it to "just work".

I got into FOSS recently and have been researching replacements for common proprietary software. Along with reddit (r/privacytoolsio) I have used alternativeto.net & privacytools.io. I would love to make a list on Tildes for anyone that is also interested in this stuff.

Telegram -> Signal: signal.org
Discord -> Riot: riot.im (surprised this isn't as popular)
Google -> FindX: findx.com (there are many others but this is my favorite)
.................searX: searx.me
Reddit -> Tildes: tildes.net (obviously)
Chrome -> Firefox: mozilla.org (there are many others but this is my favorite)
LastPass -> Bitwarden: bitwarden.com (my personal favorite but there are others)
Photoshop -> GIMP: gimp.org
FireAlpaca -> Krita: krita.org
Microsoft Office -> LibreOffice: libreoffice.org
Windows Media Player -> VLC: videolan.org (Best FOSS ever)
uTorrent -> qBittorrent: qbittorrent.org
...................Deluge: deluge-torrent.org
Adobe Illustrator -> Inkscape: inkscape.org
Adobe Premiere Pro -> Blender: blender.org (mainly 3d stuff but can be used as animation)
Windows -> Linux: ubuntu.com (ubuntu is just one distro, there are so many)
Adobe Audition -> Audacity: audacityteam.org
..............................Ardour: ardour.org
Github -> Gitlab: gitlab.com
Trello -> Taiga: taiga.io
Fraps -> OBS: obsproject.com
Gmail -> ProtonMail: protonmail.com
Youtube Client -> NewPipe: newpipe.schabi.org
Outlook -> Thunderbird: thunderbird.net
Adblock+ -> uBlock Origin: (you can get it in your browser's addon store)
Unity -> Godot Engine: godotengine.org
USD -> Bitcoin: bitcoin.org (I would suggest an altcoin like Stellar though)
... anything else? any programs you don't know a FOSS alternative to that I can find?

I'm just starting to get into the ecosystem by going through the Book of Rust, and then maybe playing with Parity. Just wondering if anyone else has been through this yet and is up for some conversation!

I'm running out of ideas, if you have any, please make your own programming challenge.

This challenge is about designing algorithm to solve this problem.

Let's have game field of size x, y (like in chess). There are two wizards, that are standing at [ 0, 0 ] and are teleporting themselves using spells. The goal is to not be the one who teleports them outside of the map. Each spell teleports wizard by at least +1 tile. Given map size and collection of spells, who wins (they do not make any mistakes)?

Here are few examples:

Example 1

x:4,y:5

Spells: { 0, 2 }

Output: false

Description: Wizard A starts, teleporting both of them to 0, 2. Wizard B teleports them to 0, 4. Wizard A has to teleport them to 0,6, which overflows from the map, so he loses the game. Because starting wizard (wizard A) loses, output is false.

Example 2

x:4,y:4

Spells: { 1,1 }

Output: true

Example 3

x:4,y:5

Spells: { 1,1 },{ 3,2 },{ 1,4 },{ 0,2 },{ 6,5 },{ 3,1 }

Output: true

Example 4

x:400,y:400

Spells: {9,2},{15,1},{1,4},{7,20},{3,100},{6,4},{9,0},{7,0},{8,3},{8,44}

Ouput: true

Good luck! I'll comment here my solution in about a day.

Note: This challenge comes from fiks, programming competition by Czech college ČVUT (CTU).

I'm looking for a project to contribute too. I'm not that experienced with programming, so I want something that isn't too complex. I'm also looking for a fairly young project. Big, mature projects don't really have much that a newbie can work on.

I'm looking for some advice on what note programs people recommend. Not a basic text editor, but something capable of doing some basic categorizing, chronological sorting, that sort of thing. I've used Evernote most recently, but I'm becoming less and less of a fan. I don't need cloud sync necessarily, although device sync could be handy. A pleasant UI (not fettered with extraneous crap) would be nice, but aesthetic appeal takes a backseat to navigation and stability. Target OS is mostly likely going to be windows 10.

What are you experiences with note apps, what are your favorites?

(A bit of context for anyone interested)
Years ago, I used tomboy notes in Ubuntu for keeping track of timesheets/daily logs. It seemed like a good program to set up for my step dad to use as well. A few years later, Tomboy notes petered out without much fanfare. I've kept his laptop running with that setup for as long as I could, but the hardware is just getting worn out (it's about 10 years old now).

So! Time to get him an upgrade. This time around, I don't think I'm gonna set up up with Linux. He isn't really up to the task of doing his own troubleshooting in linux (i.e. when an automatic update breaks something), and I haven't even been keeping up on Linux for the past few years myself. So I'm probably going to set him up on a Windows machine.

I should be able to export the tomboy notes database fairly easy, but it would be a huge load off my mind if I could settle on a decent program to migrate to first.

Thanks in advance for any input!