Or maybe companies shouldn't be outsourcing labor to applicants, asking them to do two weeks of work for free. This is not a reasonable take-home challenge by any means, for any company, and I'm glad they're being named and shamed I respect the OP for recognizing boundaries and sticking by them.
Experience: Two years as a founding engineer at a startup. In my next role, looking for something slightly larger (20+) and more established. More about me and personal projects on my site: https://teachen.info/
I used to be an avid c9 user in the classroom as well, but the startup time was killing me.
When is your 8-week program starting? Repl.it can do almost everything you want it to - our editors are fast to load, starting a server is as simple as opening a port, and we're extremely easy to use and almost feature complete. The only thing we're missing is a terminal, which is in the works (the alpha version is released, but may not work for RoR). I just want to get a sense of your timeframe so I can see if we can expedite this feature for you. Let me know if you have any questions!
Hi all, Repl.it employee here. It's worth noting that the author of the guest blog post took on this project as part of his EPQ, or Extended Project Qualification, an exploratory project undertaken by some high schoolers (equivalent) in the UK. Repl.it took no part in the origins or the directions of his work; Ollie just chose Repl.it as his tool of choice. He learned the concepts, tools, and code on his own.
Regardless of the outcome of his research, the fact that a sixteen year old felt empowered to tackle such an advanced topic and was able to teach himself the tools to dive into it is pretty damn cool.
The internet is a nasty place and you lot should recognise it as such. I did note this:
"As a self taught programmer of age 16, I knew from the start that taking on the complex topic of neural networks and then trying to combine it with the famously difficult field of prime numbers would be a challenge."
... and I read on and I am suitably impressed - good skills.
This is like the mathematical version of trying to build a perpetual motion machine for a science fair project. At 16, I may not have known enough make the GP's argument, but I would have the intellectual humility to pick a project I can reasonably understand.
I just start using your service to tutor friends trying to sharpen programming skills. I love it. I will definitely be looking to use it more. Thanks for building this awesome app!
Glad you're enjoying it! We're working on "live editing", which is the ability to see people write their code on their repl in real time. Let me know if you're interested in testing it out early! tim@repl.it :)
honestly, then y'all are mostly responsible. If you are going to have a younger student do a guest blog post, you should make sure that the project makes sense technically, or at least is not silly. What if the student tried to train a neural net to build a perpetual motion machine and reported their progress on that? Would you have posted it? That project would be about the same level of silliness as what is reported here. I don't blame them at all for doing a silly thing, but I surely blame you for making it your guest blog post.
It's more that it's awfully tortuous to use Django without it. The syntax for creating and running migrations inside a Python shell isn't very pleasant and all the documentation assumes you're doing all this from a bash shell.
> We know a lot of seasoned users
It's actually the other way around. Seasoned users can work out how to get round the lack of a shell. Beginners will be thoroughly confused.
Repl.it allows each teacher account to have up to 200 students for free! Is this enough to cover all your students? If not, reach out to me at tim@repl.it and we can work something out.
