README.md

About

Quick programming challenges and tests for Py-CU. We're still exploring, but the idea is something close in spirit (but not implementation) to a coding dojo -- a fun, effective, challenging way to solve interesting problems and learn a bunch of stuff with other people.

Setting up

(This is draft-ish.)

Clone this repository (or download the .zip)

$ [email protected]:gnarlinsky/pycu-coding-challenges.git

Create a virtualenv and install the required packages. (This is currently optional because at this point there aren't any dependencies to worry about, but hopefully later there will be.)

$ cd pycu-coding-challenges/
$ virtualenv ve --no-site-packages  # or in another directory
$ source ve/bin/activate      # activate the virtual environment
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

How to play

The files we're interested in are the challenge*.py files and associated challenge*_tests.py files, e.g. challenge5.py and challenge5_tests.py.

challenge5.py contains some skeleton code to flesh out and instructions, e.g.

def foo(the_input):
  """ This function should do foo and return bar """
  # put your code here

After you finish writing and save the file, run the tests in the associated tests file, e.g.

$ python challenge5_tests.py 
...
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 3 tests in 0.000s

Note: challenge0.py and challenge0_tests.py are simple examples to illustrate how this might work. Actual challenges should range in terms of difficulty.