Google Python Challenge #1

The cake is not a lie.

The other day I was googling some Python stuff and an invitation to a Google code challenge appeared, (the so calledfoo.bar challenge ), I am not fond of code challenges or leetcode interviews for a number of reasons, but curiosity got the best out of me and I decided to check it out, here’s a guide through the interesting setup and first challenge.

⚠️ Spoilers/Warnings: If you get an invitation and decide to partake, I encourage you to try your best to solve the challenges by yourself, least you ruin your opportunity for an interview, having said that, the challenges do get progressively harder, I myself only reached level 3 (out of 5) before running out of time and admitting to myself that I'd need to become really good at certain advanced Python and CS aspects to sail through the later parts, so if anything it's an interesting way of measuring where you are at in your coding career or skills as seen by Google, this first problem is really just an introduction and is probably bound to change in the future.

The Setup:

You get an admittedly cool looking IDE that behaves like your regular terminal, type help and the relevant commands appear, you can open a code editor on the right after requesting a challenge and navigating to the solution file solution.py …