Show HN: Coding Monkey | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Coding Monkey

codingmonkey.io

15 pointsthomship7 comments

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/ ? It will help keep the maintainability of the site down since this feels like overkill for a info site

To be honest I just used the Aurelia Skeleton app - 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!

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.

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.

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.

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

Is fun though

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.

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