This is not an answer to your question, but if you're not already familiar with it, check out Advent of Code! It's a really fun series of programming puzzles each December.
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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And you can do the previous years of the coding challenge at any time.
I took some time off, and this was a good source of solving “real” problems, rather than trying to write something to optimize for l33tcode (which, is fine… just not a good measure for typical software engineering responsibilities, IMO).
One reason we don't get much practice in this area is that the vast majority of common tasks can be accomplished with data structures and algorithms that are already implemented in libraries.
Have you considered learning a new programming language, and then helping to develop/expand its standard library, or to optimize what's there already?
Tutor people trying to get better at solving coding puzzles?
Or college student. These puzzles are great ways to explain how the code works at a basic level
There's a bioinformatics website that has a course of problems to solve that slowly teaches you fundamental bioinformatics.
I've only done about 17 of the problems. They often end up being the following format:
- take in a text file
- process the data
- output the answer
Processing the data can be calculating probabilities, matrix manipulation, string manipulation, etc. It's free to try, and you can use whatever language you're familiar with. I think Python would have libraries that would help, but it's up to you.
What I've been trying lately is hacking. I'm on www.hackthebox.com, they offer over 200 machines for you to hack. Each machine offers a service, usually a website, but last week I had a grpc machine, which has some kind of vulnerability you need to find and exploit.
A free account doesn't give acces to all machines, only +- 20 active machines. A payed account also gives you acces to all retired machines.
You do need a "starterpack" to begin with this hobby, a vm with Kali Linux is the main component, the ability to connect to a vpn is another, because the htb machines all run on vpn's.
As a programmer, you have the basic knowledge about enumeration and webservices and such, to solve easy boxes (which can still take days to hack). You'll only need to learn about tools like nmap and burpsuite, but you'll surely find some tutorials online.
The goal is to get user acces and eventually root acces (they've placed a user flag in the user home directory and a root flag in the root directory which you can submit on the htb website and gain points)
It's really fun and challenging and even educational to search for weakness on various webservices, like apache or wordpress. It can be frustrating at times, but as a programmer you know that those challenges can be the most rewarding.
I think you want to be computer scientist not an actual programmer. Maybe try to look into making phd in computer science.
Maybe try getting into theorem proving? I've heard good things about Lean and I've tried Coq for a bit and it was fun. Don't know much about this tbh.
I don't know about you, but I always get a bit of that puzzly feel when I am confronted with unstructured data that I need to process and maybe evaluate statistically.
So if you want to turn this into money, maybe a few basic online learning resources on statistics should get your foot in the door with employers. Then think of which companies in your area might have to deal with raw data (think lots of customer interaction, or also environmental agencies, insurance companies, man, gotta be lots) and just apply to your dream company even if they have no offers posted. Often there are open positions they don't advertise. And a programmer with statistical knowledge (don't be humble) and initiative should usually find some attention.
I have to suggest to try benchmark-games like this: