Eudyptula Challenge Status report

Posted Mar 26, 2017 20:34 UTC (Sun) by jmichels (guest, #98352)
In reply to: Eudyptula Challenge Status report by lkurusa
Parent article: Eudyptula Challenge Status report

I started working on it for fun. I'm still working on it, but a few issues have made it less of a priority for me.

First, I've had submissions sit in the queue for a very long time. 6 months was the worst.

Second, I've had too many submissions rejected for not doing it the way one way that little expects. I don't mind doing it the way little wants. The problem is that little doesn't tell you this ahead of time, so it kind of turns into a guessing game. I also get that the point of this is to expose you to different parts of the kernel Api in a guided way. But the guessing, coding, testing, and submitting becomes time consuming and very unsatisfying. Especially when you submit a correct and functional answer only to have it rejected for not being the correct functional submission that little wants.

Eudyptula Challenge Status report

Posted Mar 27, 2017 9:09 UTC (Mon) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link]

Thanks for sharing your experience. I think mine was a bit different. I finished the challenge a long time ago, so I probably don't remember some details and some circumstances were likely different -- perhaps queues were shorter and Little was a bit quicker to answer.

To me it seems that the slowness of responses and rejections of solutions that work but still need some improvements teaches you patience that is so essential in collaborative software projects. The responses were always rather good; even though sometimes a bit challenging to understand.

As for me I've had great fun doing the challenge and recommend it to everyone. But arm yourself with patience and dedicate time to it, especially if you're not a veteran in the area.

Eudyptula Challenge Status report

Posted Mar 27, 2017 14:50 UTC (Mon) by geuder (subscriber, #62854) [Link] (3 responses)

> Especially when you submit a correct and functional answer only to have it rejected for not being the correct functional submission that little wants.

They say it's a bunch of scripts behind the scenes. So maybe too little human review and as soon as you code a bit different from what the scripts' author expected you will get a reject? Of course formatting that checkpatch.pl does not like should be rejected. But even when checkpatch.pl is happy every programming problem has an infinite number of valid solutions (or at least a very big one for all reasonably practical cases)

Just guessing, no experience.

Of course it happens all the time in development teams, whether open source or not, that the reviewer has some points that the author does not agree with. Either deeming the reviewer's suggestions completely equivalent to the code under review or even worse.

Eudyptula Challenge Status report

Posted Mar 27, 2017 17:52 UTC (Mon) by ntnn (guest, #109693) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm doing the challenge at the moment and I have the feeling that it actually is a human/some humans doing the review - just with the help of a lot of scripts, so their input would be nothing more than 'reject' or 'accept'

E.g. I send in a solution yesterday night and was at place four. I got the next task today around midday - automated scripts would work a lot faster.

Eudyptula Challenge Status report

Posted Mar 28, 2017 2:41 UTC (Tue) by rav (guest, #89256) [Link] (1 responses)

I have the same impression. I advanced from Task 2 to Task 5 over the weekend (after having completed Task 1 almost three years ago). Grading Tasks 2 to 4 took 15 hours, 4 minutes and 19 hours, respectively; I received the grade from Little at times Sun, 26 Mar 2017 08:47:23 +0000, Sun, 26 Mar 2017 19:26:21 +0000 and Mon, 27 Mar 2017 15:44:12 +0000.

I'll submit Task 5 tomorrow (when I have access to a USB keyboard, he he he... I've probably revealed too much now).

Eudyptula Challenge Status report

Posted Mar 28, 2017 10:05 UTC (Tue) by JacobvonChorus (guest, #109772) [Link]

I just signed up, and look forward to getting my hands dirty. It's a neat initiative, I'm a strong believer in learn-by-doing and this seems really good.