4 ms·

Show HN: Coding Monkey

15 points by thomship 9y ago

thomship 9y ago
Hey HN! Coding Monkey is a site to practise coding in C#. It isn't anything new (Coding Bat, Hacker Rank all do the same and better) and still rough around the edges but it is the first side project I have actually finished and shipped so any feedback would be great.
- kwhitefoot 9y ago
  Not sure that I can see much value in it if the response to a failure is just a compiler error message. The response should explain why the submitted solution is wrong and give a suggested solution with an explanation of why it is to be preferred. For instance this compiles in Visual Studio 2015 but fails on Coding Monkey: public class StringManipulation { public string GetFirstLetter(string input) { return input.SubString(0, 1); } } with this error: CS1061 5 'string' does not contain a definition for 'SubString' and no extension method 'SubString' accepting a first argument of type 'string' could be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?) What's going on? MSDN says that string is an alias for System.String which definitely has SubString(). I don't use C# very much but I do use .Net very heavily so I am very interested to know why that code doesn't work on Coding Monkey. Perhaps it will improve my code. Edit: I do realize that explaining why something is wrong is a seriously difficult task, but eventually the same wrong answers will appear repeatedly so a canned response should be possible in the end, at least for some code.
  - thomship 9y ago
    Hey - I think that is a problem on my side. I have taken the site down for now after someone gave me some feedback on a security issue. To be honest I am not too sure what is going on here but I shall have a look - while changing the code execution engine to be a bit more secure/robust. As far as canned responses it is a good idea - and would definitely add some value, for now, I wanted to get a rough copy out to see what the feedback looks like and I shall have a look to see how I might be able to do this.
cgrusden 9y ago
Initial feedback, why does this site have all the fancy loading gifs etc, why not just ake it basic html like sites like https://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ https://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ ? It will help keep the maintainability of the site down since this feels like overkill for a info site
- thomship 9y ago
  To be honest I just used the Aurelia Skeleton app - https://github.com/aurelia/skeleton-navigation https://github.com/aurelia/skeleton-navigation which had font awesome already part of the project so I just used it cause it was readily available and did the job. Frontend work is certainly not my strong suit!
mikerg87 9y ago
How can I track my progress. Anyway to know how many compiles / runs it took to get an exercise right Is fun though
- thomship 9y ago
  Yeah, it definitely needs some user progress tracking. I like how CodingBat does this - it tells you how many times you attempted and even has graphs. It is something I am looking to add once I get some of the more fundamental things (security) right.

15 points by thomship 9y ago

Hey HN! Coding Monkey is a site to practise coding in C#. It isn't anything new (Coding Bat, Hacker Rank all do the same and better) and still rough around the edges but it is the first side project I have actually finished and shipped so any feedback would be great.

kwhitefoot 9y ago
Not sure that I can see much value in it if the response to a failure is just a compiler error message. The response should explain why the submitted solution is wrong and give a suggested solution with an explanation of why it is to be preferred. For instance this compiles in Visual Studio 2015 but fails on Coding Monkey: public class StringManipulation { public string GetFirstLetter(string input) { return input.SubString(0, 1); } } with this error: CS1061 5 'string' does not contain a definition for 'SubString' and no extension method 'SubString' accepting a first argument of type 'string' could be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?) What's going on? MSDN says that string is an alias for System.String which definitely has SubString(). I don't use C# very much but I do use .Net very heavily so I am very interested to know why that code doesn't work on Coding Monkey. Perhaps it will improve my code. Edit: I do realize that explaining why something is wrong is a seriously difficult task, but eventually the same wrong answers will appear repeatedly so a canned response should be possible in the end, at least for some code.
- thomship 9y ago
  Hey - I think that is a problem on my side. I have taken the site down for now after someone gave me some feedback on a security issue. To be honest I am not too sure what is going on here but I shall have a look - while changing the code execution engine to be a bit more secure/robust. As far as canned responses it is a good idea - and would definitely add some value, for now, I wanted to get a rough copy out to see what the feedback looks like and I shall have a look to see how I might be able to do this.

cgrusden 9y ago

Initial feedback, why does this site have all the fancy loading gifs etc, why not just ake it basic html like sites like https://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ https://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ ? It will help keep the maintainability of the site down since this feels like overkill for a info site

thomship 9y ago
To be honest I just used the Aurelia Skeleton app - https://github.com/aurelia/skeleton-navigation https://github.com/aurelia/skeleton-navigation which had font awesome already part of the project so I just used it cause it was readily available and did the job. Frontend work is certainly not my strong suit!

mikerg87 9y ago

How can I track my progress. Anyway to know how many compiles / runs it took to get an exercise right Is fun though

thomship 9y ago
Yeah, it definitely needs some user progress tracking. I like how CodingBat does this - it tells you how many times you attempted and even has graphs. It is something I am looking to add once I get some of the more fundamental things (security) right.