Project Euler is offline

After hearing about it for years, I decided to start working through Project Euler about two weeks ago. It really is much more about math than programming, although it's a lot of fun to take on the problems with a language that has tail call optimization because so many of the problems involve recurrence relations. I like that the problems are constructed in a way that usually punishes you for trying to use brute force. Sometimes there's a problem that…

12 years ago I was a failed computer science student, wasting my time on drugs. Having failed so many classes I did not see any future at all, and I was considering killing myself to get out of the anxiety and stress. My confidence regarding programming etc was 0. I decided to apply for a junior developer job. I got an interview and to prepare for an interview I found this site, Project Euler. I did ten or so tasks…

For people that love Project Euler, check out project rosalind! http://rosalind.info/about/ Conceptually similar, but the problems are focused around bioinformatics. Most lot of the problems contain some background context that teaches you a little biology/statistics as well.

The best technical interview I ever had involved picking a random Project Euler problem in the hundreds and pair-programming our way through it. The CTO wrote his version in Python and I worked in Perl . . . he was astounded mine ran 8x faster. The same company also had regular hack night where everyone drinks a lot of Tecate, agress on a Project Euler problem and a language no one knows, and races. Fun times.