Problem solving questions with code (Edabit, Codewars, Hackerrank, etc)

[atomiks]

A large part of interviews isn't just answering questions like the ones currently, but also solving problems using real code. I think in order for this project to provide enough value to truly go viral as a great interview preparation source, it needs to allow people to submit solutions to common programming problems / assess their problem-solving ability using code too.

I can implement this functionality this weekend 🚀

[fejes713]

I am totally fine with this but there is one thing that I see as a potential problem in the future. Once we hit 100+ questions which is hopefully going to be very soon we are going to have too many nodes on our website which is going to slow down performance 👎? I might be wrong.

[flxwu]

regarding performance, I would not load all questions at once but rather have some kind of infinite scrolling. what's your opinion on that? @atomiks

[atomiks]

@flxwu yes,

something like react virualized for hyperapp would be ideal I think: https://github.com/bvaughn/react-virtualized

[fejes713]

@flxwu @atomiks that's one problem solved (partially) but what about scrolling when we have 1000 nodes? We had no issues with loading all snippets in 30code but the scrolling through them was a nightmare 😞

[skatcat31]

Really? I never noticed how bad it is... I always just go directly to the snippet... I've got pages with upwards of 10k nodes that scroll just fine at work and we have them animated. I'm convinced there's something else we're doing that's killing it.

[skatcat31]

I think at that point we should ONLY show descriptions, set display false on questions that aren't being display, and when a description or see more is clicked, set display true so that the nodes then show up and get rendered, and limit it to ten being shown at a time(this will take a front end script).

It should then be easy to show a couple thousand questions. It's when we get to rendering a lot of code highlighting or layering we get in trouble. If we do display none, and then animate it's appearance we should be able to avoid it, right?

[skatcat31]

As for the problem solving questions I'm all for this! They'd have to go into a section though and it could get hairy as showing code to solve a question like 'Prove a binary search tree is symmetrical' is a PAIN to put into a short format...

[atomiks]

I think the node count thing won't be a problem for a while. We can solve it later.

I'd like to have a tab that splits the current one with code-solving ones.

I'd call the current ones Open Response The code ones Code Challenges

[Chalarangelo]

Regarding the node count, we can always switch to multi-page when the problem starts being more prominent, like we did with 30-seconds-of-code. it really makes a difference and navigation feels like one page, you just get a second of loading every once in a while if you go from category to category.

[atomiks]

We're going to add code challenges as part of the open responses for now like the fibonacci question.