Coding Challenge: Learn how to use "cycling elements" by making a game
I've been creating little coding challenges for my colleagues / mentees for years, but now I'm trying to "build up my own brand", so this is the first one I'm making available for "public consumption".
https://magrippis.com/coding-challenges/2020/cycling-element
I find there are two common roadblocks to learning something new, be it React hooks, or docker-compose, or async/await, or GraphQL schemas, or apollo-client:
- there is too much setup before getting to the thing you want to learn
- there isn't a realistic use-case and constraints to help guide your learning
The setup for this challenge is minimal and you'll find a Code Sandbox to get you started in the link, but I believe the spec will motivate you keep going and face some problems that'll be interesting to solve :-)
If you do give it a go, you'd be one of the first "strangers on the internet" to have tried one of my challenges, so your feedback would be invaluable! Does the setup make sense? Am I communicating the value well? Are you personally finding value in it, regardless of how I'm pitching it?
In general, the challenges come about when I'm faced with something at work. Two examples:
Debugging slow responses from the server to being due to synchronous backend-to-backend calls resulted to a challenge that guides to a good async / parallel requests solution.
A few PRs that took a while because they needed to extend how we useContext and we don't understand it that well, resulted in a Code Sandbox that has us playing with that API in a more isolated setting; but still not a trivial setting where you wouldn't need to be using context in the first place.
I do think there's value to be found in this specific format. Different than a kata, different to a polished tutorial that perfectly showcases a specific solution, not the problem that might benefit from that solution in the first place.
Hope you give it a go, and enjoy!
