List of all #WeekendDevPuzzles

weekend-dev-puzzles-list.md

Weekend Dev Puzzle

Some time between 2021-22, I ran a list of puzzles designed to push developers into developing a better understanding of the technologies they use on a day to day basis. Each puzzle is designed to be fun, provocative, and short.

This is a complete list of those puzzles. Each link takes you to the tweet where I first posed the problem. If you like any of them, please feel free to share with others.

Edit (2024-01-27): Adding other puzzles to this 2024 onwards. Criteria:

1. Problem statement should be understandable by most in s/w tech, even if the ability to figure it out may not be.
2. Thinking about the problem should lead to clearer understanding of some foundational concept.
3. Should be short.
4. Should be fun to ponder over.

List

• 2024-04-18: (via @championswimmer) Goroutine suspension points and how do coroutines slow down if I run more than physical core capacity
• 2022-08-01: What has more entropy? All possible literature in English? Or the digits of π (pi)?
• 2022-02-12: Limiting factor in playing an arcade style space shooter via sensors and a hooked up keyboard.
• 2022-02-05: Does the time taken to count integers (that are less than a threshold) in an unordered array, remain the same, or vary?
• 2022-01-29: Does splitting a service into microservices help or hurt the availability?
• 2022-01-22: Can closures+lambdas be implemented irrespective of whether the language is garbage collected?
• 2022-01-15: Debugger crashed before a breakpoint was hit. What happens to the program being debugged?
• 2022-01-08: No puzzle on account of my travels
• 2022-01-01: Relative CPU performance of a process b/w native vs docker vs VM.
• 2021-12-25: While a CPU is waiting for data to load from RAM, is it seen as idle or busy by the OS?
• 2021-12-18: Source of randomness in a JWT token issue when running on cloud.
• 2021-12-11: Summing rows vs columns in a large matrix of numbers.
• 2021-12-04: On what kinds of code will JIT perform better than precompiled C code.
• 2021-11-27: When serving files from disk, is uncompressed faster than compressed?

Not sure if worth adding to this list itself, but I was interested in adding some more puzzles of this type (who knows how many I'll be able to keep up with). Adding as a comment here.

• 2024-01-18 : Goroutine suspension points and how do coroutines slow down if I run more than physical core capacity

@championswimmer absolutely, and thanks for adding more of these to the list. I've also edited the gist to better define the criteria (for this list that I'm maintaining), in case your puzzles inspire others to add too.

IIUC, the nature of your puzzle is not Go specific (except for the automatic suspension point on I/O), so if you'd like to rephrase the title in this gist, let me know, else we can leave it the way you phrased it.