He had an interview with Google and they asked him to invert a binary tree, which is essentially taking a tree of data and swapping the positions of all sibling nodes.

While most people agreed it was a pretty pointless question to ask at an interview, mxcl had a full “don’t you know who I am” shit fit on social media.

If anyone hasn’t made the connection, mxcl is the infamous Google interview binary tree guy

nothing purrsonal kit

It depends on your intent. If you’re doing it to keep history clean and linear in the long term, it’s a huge waste of time as it gets splatted into a single squashed merge commit. It also makes it difficult for reviewers to rereview your changes as GitHub/Lab can’t calculate the diff because you keep moving the goalposts with force pushes.

If you’re doing it for cleanliness on your local branch then I guess that’s fine, but I find it anti-social in a multi participant repo.

Agreed. I’ve been trying to explain to someone recently why rebasing and force pushing their feature branch has no benefit when we use a squash commit strategy for merging to main.

Again, tools are not blame, but when combined with a lack of understanding and accumulated “git dogma”, it can be quite disheartening.

Same. I mostly use sourcetree to do quick self-reviews and to discard lines or hunks before a commit.

But I’ve also grown very weary of having to dig people out of git messes they’ve made with sourcetree and the likes.

Visual clients aren’t to blame for that, but they contribute. So many times I’ve asked “and what git commands did that run?” only to receive a dumb stare as a reply.

I think it’s exactly that. They are targeted at bootstrapping projects and prototyping and are, frankly, very good at that job.

Not sure on your use case, but I’ve been using Hetzner for a while and it does what it says on the tin.

That sounds hard and discord already has my retinal scans

I just wanna chat over the internet using some sort of relay. If only there were a solution.

Yes you’re correct, this was the point I was making.

To elaborate: could be 100s of times in a codebase, even 1000s, being executed in tests on local machines and build servers 100s of times a day, etc. etc.

rand will be called every time true is used, which could be hundreds of times for all we know

You win

It creates an ssh tunnel and then sends the file over http, so … literally no advantage to using this over ssh/scp.

Worse in every way, actually.

The show and tell page is exactly that, show and tell; not a scientific or balanced comparison.

The original challenge only compared JDK solution in this way. Further down there is a link to another repo that does that same across many languages, and uses the same M1 MacBook Pro to run the tests.

To answer your question about environmental and hardware factors - from the repo:

Results are determined by running the program on a Hetzner Cloud CCX33 instance (8 dedicated vCPU, 32 GB RAM). The time program is used for measuring execution times, i.e. end-to-end times are measured.

The red flag came earlier than the author indicated.

We have everything important figured out

No, you don’t.

You don’t have buy-in from, seemingly, anyone. You don’t have investment to pay for labor, meaning that no one except you and some other daydreamer have any faith in your idea.

Which puts your idea on par with my niece’s idea to have ice cream for breakfast, and her brother’s endorsement of it.

An idea being simple - even by the standard of someone without the ability to assess its simplicity - still doesn’t make it a good one.

Absolutely. I generally find any kind of analogous coding tasks - leetcoder style or otherwise - to be a huge waste of time.

It tells you significantly less than a 30 minute conversation will. Someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about will out themselves quickly when you get into the nitty gritty of the full software delivery lifecycle.

I have a GCSE in IT, and a degree in CompSci and… I completely agree. You don’t need any of it, relevant experience is worth in the region of 5x-10x for every hiring manager I’ve known, and for myself.

However, it does cause a bootstrapping problem. Getting that first opportunity can be tough, and there’s a good chance that you’ll be filtered out at CV vetting time by a recruiter matching keywords and tallying CV content before you even get to a stage of consideration by hiring managers.

And they both have pros and cons. The pros of not doing a degree are mostly fiscal. I’d advise anyone who can afford the overhead of doing a degree to do one still.

tl;dr - lack of education isn’t and shouldn’t be an obstacle to starting a programming career, but you should still understand what you’re up against in the average hiring process and tune your approach accordingly.

I can’t fucking believe you’ve done this