#1 The Computer Engineer Code Challenge

To begin this challenge I would love to write algorithms about Hopfield Net or the Hanoi Tower and I will write, just will be a little bit later. Right now, I’m a backend developer striving to become a full stack developer, working with Django, React JS and other technologies of the moment. I’m in a new job and haven’t yet mastered the Python’s/Javascript’s world. For summarize I need to work on my programmer skills.

With that goal in mind, I chose spent the last month exercising my programming skills in CodeFights website. CodeFights is an excellent tool for training and offers different types of practice like:

• Interview Practice: Makes it easy to prepare for technical interviews
• Company Bot: Your chance to challenge programming bots trained by engineers from top tech companies
• Arcade: Is a series of tasks to unlock new levels and locations.
• Head-to-Head: Pretty much a battle against your friends and strangers
• Tournaments: Real-time coding competitions (Best of all).

At first, I was playing the arcade mode, confess, I felt really smart, but this feeling decrease when the challenges became more difficult, let me show you:

1. Given a year, return the century it is in. The first century spans from the year 1 up to and including the year 100, the second — from the year 101 up to and including the year 200, etc.

My Result:
def centuryFromYear(year):
    if year % 100 == 0:
        return year/100
    else:
        return int(year/100) + 1

Does it look easy right? But let up the level a little bit

2. Given a decimal integer n, find an integer k ≥ 2 such that the representation of n in base k has the maximum possible number of zeros. If there are several answers, output the smallest one.

• For n = 9, the output should be
  maxZeros(n) = 2.
  9 = 10012 = 1003 = 214...
  If you'll try all other bases, you'll see that the maximum possible number of zeros in these representations is 2, thus the answer is k = 2.

Not My Result
def maxZeros(n):
    maxZ = -1
    maxB = -1
    for base in range(2, n+1):
        num = n 
        tot = 0
        while num > 0:
            if num % base == 0:
                tot += 1
            num //= base
        if tot > maxZ:
            maxZ = tot 
            maxB = base
            
    return maxB

If you think these challenges were easy, imagine having 10 minutes to solve 3 challenges with this same degree of difficulty and don’t forget the competition of 4 or 5 other developers.

At first, you won’t finish the 3 challenges, you progress gradually and when you see it, the goal is not just to solve the issues, but to solve in the best way possible. And that’s when you research and check how your opponents crack the challenge and go to the documentation, forums and etc.

That’s all folks and join me on CodeFights!