Ideas for challenges

[gnarlinsky]

brain-vomity:

• challenges that build on each other
• use non-standard libraries
  • BeautifulSoup
  • NLTK
  • requests
• write the tests as part of the challenge
• graphics/image manipulation (PIL?)
• Designing algorithms in a language-agnostic way, as well as Python-specific stuff
• Project Euler, http://projecteuler.net/

[crism]

I really like the progressive challenge idea. Pick a long-term goal, something cool(ish), and break it into steps. Pick a winner or combination of winning code from each stage to build toward the goal.

As I said in e-mail, testing could be fun with a two-phase challenge, with the first phase being to write unit tests, the second to write code tested against those tests. (When a test fails, is the problem the code, or the test?)

Algorithm work is good. Maybe something relatively straightforward, but impossibly time- or memory-consuming if not implemented correctly (sorting, graph traversal).

A modular project with a pre-defined class structure and API, and each player (team or individual) given a class to implement to the API.