31/12/2014
Today is the last day of our GregorianCalendar.YEAR. As I was working through my "todo" list from 2014 to try and clear everything, I found a reference to the Project Euler website (https://projecteuler.net/). The questions are a combination of maths and computer programming. Lots of fun! So much fun in fact that I've spent the last two days working through the first 50 questions.
Here is how Project Euler will help you:
1. You will get to solve some tricky programming tasks.
2. You will need to think about performance, especially complexity of
the algorithms that you are using.
3. You will get good practice if you ever need to go for a job
interview. Some of the questions sounded like something that a
brainiac interviewer might throw at you.
4. You will get to improve your brain by exercising it. Use it or
lose it. A good reason to go neither into management nor politics.
5. You don't have to solve the problem in Java. You can use a piece
of paper and a pencil. Of vi. I solved some of the most difficult
questions with vi.
As I mentioned before, I solved the first 50 questions in two days,
whilst also doing other things. Some of the puzzles were easy to
solve and others took a longer time. Whenever I could, I used the
Java 8 streams and syntax. That also was good practice for me. Some of the tasks seemed impossible to solve with streams. Others were a perfect fit, and even helped me solve problems using parallel streams.
I was quite surprised that less than 7% of people who registered on
the site had completed 50 questions. I'm pretty sure that anyone
reading The Java Specialists' Newsletter will be able to beat that
quickly. And if you get bored, please feel free to work through our
archive: http://www.javaspecialists.eu/archive - there's plenty there
to keep you entertained :-)
That's it for now - see you on the other side. I wish you a most
wonderful 2015!
Kind regards
Heinz
P.S. Parleys is hosting some of my courses now, allowing you to make use of this quiet time to catch up on some much-needed training. Here is my channel if you are interested:
https://parleys.com/channel/5423b961e4b07b42e9a84431
A website dedicated to the fascinating world of mathematics and programming
