Hello World?

Matthew Cole 2015-01-01 03:06:44

Hello everyone,

I appear to have broken with tradition, and saved Hello World! for my 66th problem... Apologies! My name is Matthew. I was born in 1982 and I'm from New York, USA by way of London, UK and Seattle, USA. I'm also on LinkedIn and Project Euler. My FK is 9128_35a8addfd3515461fa89460d631987c1.

I'll be starting as post-graduate student in Computer Science come Fall 2015, and have been doing adjunct work in the meantime. I took a decade-long gap since my undergraduate degree in Computer Science, so Code Abbey has been most helpful getting back up to speed.

I'm previously experienced in C++, Java, Lisp and Perl. But after coming back I've decided to learn a new language, and I've been finding Python to be the trusty switchblade I had always wanted. My areas of special interest include data sciences and information security. I got hooked on Computer Science by the thrill of finally getting a piece of code to solve a problem. That's probably true for most of us. Outside computers, I love anything in the outdoors: cycling, skiing, mountain climbing, kayaking. That's a product of where I've lived.

I want to especially say thank you to Rodion for putting this site together. It's been incredibly useful and challenging, not to mention addicting. I finally made my one-month goal of Priest yesterday, just before the New Year. I was well pleased with myself, but I now realize I have another 60+ to go and it's only getting tougher as I progress! If there's anything I can ever do to help out (Rodion or anyone else), please let me know.

Cheers and happy coding, everyone!

Rodion (admin) 2015-01-01 09:26:33

Hi Matthew!

Thanks a lot for writing about yourself - it is very helpful to understand better the audience of the site :)

And surely your LinkedIn profile is quite impressive - I suspect that currently you held the highest military rank among the users of our site. Though of course I have no statistics... :)

BTW, if it is not a secret are you pursuing your next degree in CS just out of curiosity, or it is supposed to help you move forward in your career (either military or civil)? I myself had the fancy to apply to University last summer for CS master program - but it appeared that I could not dedicate enough time to such goal currently.

Thanks also for your kind words and your participation. People's participation, problem ideas and hints on improving the site - that is the most valuable and helpful and, well, pleasing!

BTW it looks like PE complains the given FK is incorrect :-o

As about the progress - I dare say that 65 problems in a month is one of the fastest. :) By the way, haven't you tried online contests at TopCoder or CodeForces? I suspect that as you progress in CS the problems at this small site will soon become too simple for you and bit too boring - and you may find competitive programming more to your liking! :)

sincerely yours, Rodion

nicolas_patrois 2015-01-01 11:01:13

Your friend key is invalid, I confirm.

Matthew Cole 2015-01-02 07:04:03

Rodion,

I'm working on my PhD as a change in career. My last jobs in the military were fine, but they didn't give me the kind of job satisfaction that my undergraduate research did. I'm completely out of the military at this point. Had I stayed in, I probably would be getting a post-graduate degree in nuclear physics or systems engineering instead.

I'll take a look at TopCoder and CodeForces later. So far, I've found plenty of challenge in the problem sets here, so no worries about that. They've been just right to stretch my working knowledge of Python and get into new modules that make solving problems easier. So far, my only disappointment in that regard is that a lot of the classic data structures (like trees and linked lists, for example) aren't implemented. So the Code Abbey and Project Euler problems have forced me to design them myself. And that's good.

Speaking of Project Euler, I just generated a new FK. Try this one: 709128_09f2023ecb8c5c77cc0ebb30d900dc78

Rodion (admin) 2015-01-03 06:29:01

Matthew, Hi!

Thanks for new key - it works perfectly!

So as I see, you are going to get PhD soon? I confess that I always admire people who have enough will and devotion to continue education that far. It may happen that you'll be able to pretend for some quite interesting, semi-researching job positions. Though it sounds that you already had some, in other fields! :)

I'm curious what for you wanted to use trees and linked lists? Really Java Collections are reacher and Python lacks about a half of them (and I'm not sure it has any concurrent versions of them). I believe however that few problems (like Huffman's algorithm or one about Binary Heap) involve hand-made trees... Meanwhile I'm out of ideas what exercise could be invented which require usage of linked list instead of usual array-like one. Even "LinkedList" in Java is rarely useful, as I understand...

Though nevertheless it is often asked at job interviews :) So this discussion leads me to think that once in future we may want to add a kind of "tests" along with ordinary problems!

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