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“This project will only take 2 hours”

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Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#221
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not necessary coding work for someone who intends to use the project themselves and can run tail -f /var/some-log-from-a-clipboard-daemon | grep big-tld-regex They asked for a project idea and he gave them a product idea.

I would be quite happy with this, actually. I wouldn't even bother with the tld regex and just settle for "http" The part I'm missing is what to tail?

Plasma/KDE's Klipper clipboard app has Actions that will do this, fwiw. http://linux-blog.org/make-klipper-work-for-you/.

You could probably do it very simply by remapping ctrl+c depending on your DE.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#222
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This way it ensures you only spend 2 hours on it without being penalized. If you are free to spend any amount of time you can be sure someone spent 40 hours working on it, you really don't want to compete with that. So another person would say that this combines the best from take home and white board, you don't have to travel anywhere for the interview, you get to do a project rather than algorithm, and it doesn't w…

A 2-hour project is hardly a project. It's still a contrived problem with limited scope. I don't see it as an improvement. And you're assuming that the person who is assigning the task can estimate it correctly (this goes back to the topic of the OP). I suppose people's preferences vary a lot. Personally, I would turn this down. The format of "do as much work alone under pressure" is extremely offputting. I'd much ra…

…but they said they schedule the 2 hours for whenever you please, so the only thing being limited on here is it being an honest “2 hour project” rather than a “10 hour project that we expect you to lie about.” You still get to do it whenever you please.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the >> going to cause urls.txt to grow geometrically? eg, copying http://example.com/foo and then http://example.com/bar and then http://example.com/baz I think urls.txt would look like: http://example.com/foo http://example.com/foo http://example.com/bar http://example.com/foo http://example.com/bar http://example.com/baz EDIT: I stand corrected. I should have run the code instead of mentally executing it. One…

Doesn't look like it. The URLS variable could more appropriately be named CURRENT_URL. Singular, not plural.

The user might copy a block of text with multiple URLs, all of which get pulled out by the grep.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the >> going to cause urls.txt to grow geometrically? eg, copying http://example.com/foo and then http://example.com/bar and then http://example.com/baz I think urls.txt would look like: http://example.com/foo http://example.com/foo http://example.com/bar http://example.com/foo http://example.com/bar http://example.com/baz EDIT: I stand corrected. I should have run the code instead of mentally executing it. One…

Doesn't look like it. The URLS variable could more appropriately be named CURRENT_URL. Singular, not plural.

[deleted]

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#225
If someone actually builds this, you should just create a directory in the browser bookmarks and let the user use their standard browser (FF/Chrome) to actually browse the data. Maybe isolate it by YYYY-MM directory structure to make it easier to browse.

The important thing is that all of these automatically get synced and become searchable easily.

Good idea.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone can write a rough command line tool that monitors the clipboard and prints to stdout. There's a good chance that this will solve 95% of all needs. Most of the features suggested in the article beyond the original premise are unnecessary.

>There's a good chance that this will solve 95% of all needs. Most of the features suggested in the article beyond the original premise are unnecessary. The teacher is the client. The client is the one who will better estimate what is necessary or not. If you own a company and someone wants to contract you for work, you start explaining how what the client says it needs is not necessary and how he can manage with les…

> The teacher is the client.

This is absurd. The students are the client. They asked the teacher for ideas for a hobby project. The teacher provided one, then followed up with a question about an estimate. Naturally, a student gave an estimate of how much time it would take to produce the product that they themselves were envisioning.

It’s not unreasonable for the teacher to point out additional features they might want to do, and how that affects such an estimate, but it IS unreasonable to call the original estimate “wrong.” It’s not wrong for a particular scope.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#229
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> VB6, despite its stupid programming language, is still the golden standard for a GUI application design I think the reason is that many programmers have an urge to do things in a stupidly hard and complex way to look competent. Real programmers do not use GUI drag and drop design tools.

That's right, they use butterflies (or emacs). Why shouldn't you design a GUI using a visual interface? Do you also write SVG's in notepad?

I should have written 'real programmers' in quotes.

I was referring to the classic joke chain mail about 'real programmers' punching flip switches on mainframes or using FORTRAN, not Pascal.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"here's a computer, please implement a function in $languageOnYouCV that receives two words and returns true if they are anagrams of each other, false otherwise, if time permits add some unit tests" seems to fulfill that need just as well, and should be quick enough that being in the room or not is more about what makes the candidate more comfortable and gives the most insight for the interviewer.

That sort of problem is about the right level of complexity for a candidate to show they can think about a problem, provide an implementation, and discuss alternatives. Something they should be able to do without ever studying or grinding LeetCode. However, there's always room for the interviewer to muck things up. For the anagram problem, there are a range of solutions, including elegant & inefficient, clever & effi…

At that point it's not a coding exercise, it's a full blown case study.

This isn't a programming contest and your company isn't ACM

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