Any programmer who has been in the field for a while will be able to testify that most programming is of the boring sort. You know, putting front-ends onto database backends, and that sort of thing.
Yes, I know there are a few lucky programmers out there who get to work on exciting pieces of code every day (my job comes close) but for the average programmer, coding can become dull.
As an antidote for this, I discovered a website called Project Euler that is aimed at sharpening the mental faculties of programmers by setting a series of tasks and seeing how you fare.
The problems are all mathematical and require you to only supply the answer which they are looking for. This means that you can use any programmatic approach you want to find the answer, since the only thing that matters is the answers.
This does mean that there is nothing stopping you from cheating. You could easily google up an answer, but that would defeat the purpose of the site. the site does say that it encourages you to use Google (or other means) to research how to work out the answer, but says you should not look up answers directly.
The site also ranks you as to how many problems you have solved. There are 255 problems on the site, and you start at rank 1 once you have completed 25 problems.
I can see this is going to be the way I am going to spend many a lunch hour over the coming months……
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