I did learn about Kafka though – apparently the company putting on the hackathon is very interested in using this distributed event streaming platform which is so massive it needs 8GB of RAM just to load up. Not something I can just load up on a VPS then unfortunately – I also learned about RedPanda, the Kafka replacement which was written in C++ instead of Java – which I might want to look at in future.
For now Mosquitto MQTT which I already use has a persistent memory option which is far less heavy on resources than either of these and might actually cover the same use case for smaller projects (in combination with a database)..
Anyway what turned me off of the hackathon was:
- The requirement to not use AI assisted coding – this is the future of coding and I don’t do programming without my Aider coding assistant. I wouldn’t do coding without code completion, linter, documentation, testing, and versioning either.
- The problems were basic
– Sort letters in a string (!). If I wanted to do that I would go onto leetcode or somewhere and get my fill of algorithm fiddling, or write one prompt in Aider and get the answer instantly (or just search StackOverflow). What a waste of time, is this really going to find out how good you are at actual programming?*
– Basic Kafka event pipeline, type the code into a bash prompt – I kid you not, type the Python code into a bash prompt. What about indenting? How does this even..**
– another algorithm challenge, tldr (I already already left at this point).
I feel sorry for any corporate wannabee programmers who have to deal with this type of thing to get considered. I am also sad that I didn’t have a chance to show my actual skills (not memorising syntax/algorithms) to compete to earn the prize.
Moving on..
*OK I looked up the actual use of “k unique characters” algorithm and it’s legit useful, but I am definitely not looking for a research position, just use the current state-of-the-art algo and move onto dealing with the data?
**I’m guessing this is to try and stop AI input?