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If it's any consolation, Peter Norvig's Sudoku solver seems so readable on the surface that I've fallen into the trap of thinking it looks easy, or that I fully get it. :)

0: http://norvig.com/sudoku.html

Maybe you should try a reverse interview process. Send them the original problem, ask them to have one of their top developers solve it, and then compare solutions.

Is this a real thing ?

It should be.

I once wrote a custom report generator that could pair basically arbitrary input formats (pluggable, I think by the time I was done I'd written importers for CSV, fixed width, and JSON data) and output custom PDF output, with fully-user definable formatting/elements - using XML "templates" just because I didn't want to write a custom parser. Included loops, if statements, etc, and some pretty fancy output features (e.g. output N records per page, with custom sorting, headers/footers/etc). Used ReportLab for the PDF generation. Whole thing was under 1k lines of Python 2.