Programming challenge websites

To maintain my limited Elixir programming skills, I use coding challenge websites such as Hackerrank, Codewars, and, more recently, Exercism. The sites offer puzzles that can be solved in different coding languages. The websites have a decent online editor so you can get right into coding.

While the exercises certainly aid me in keeping up rudimentary skills in Elixir, the tasks are mostly brain teasers, which require minimal coding. Unfortunately, it is difficult to find any exercises which are about the issues I face in my daily work — things as manipulating complex data structures, mapping them to new ones, and so on.

Practicing programming like this has the same issues as using these kinds of puzzles as interview questions. Interviewee with a decade of experience is demeaned and humiliated by a seemingly simple task under the stressful circumstances. I have seen this over and over again when giving interviews, and nowadays, I am firmly against live coding.

One of the better exercises I recently solved was to simulate a bank account. No complex arithmetic is needed. You can focus on writing code, which addresses the issue elegantly with clearly defined data structures, which is the essential thing in the daily job as a coder.

Comments

I'm not a passionate developer

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Hubristic developer

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Extracting object properties from an IFC file with IfcOpenShell

Besides the object geometry information, IFC files may contain properties for the IFC objects. The properties can be, for example, some predefined dimension information such as an object volume or a choice of material. Some of the properties are predefined in the IFC standards, but custom ones can be added. IFC files can be massive and resource-intensive to process, so in some cases, it helps to separate the object properties from the geometry data. IfcOpenShell is a toolset for processing IFC files. It is written mostly in C++ but also provides a Python interface. To read an IFC file >>> ifc_file = ifcopenshell.open("model.ifc") Fetch all objects of type IfcSlab >>> slab = ifc_file.by_type("IfcSlab")[1] Get the list of properties >>> slab.IsDefinedBy (#145075=IfcRelDefinesByType('2_fok0__fAcBZmMlQcYwie',#1,$,$,(#27,#59),#145074), #145140=IfcRelDefinesByProperties('3U2LyORgXC2f_hWf6I16C1',#1,$,$,(#27,#59),#145141), #145142

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