RunCode.ninja Challenges

This post was born on a misty saturday morning, while slowly sipping some good quality coffe in a Prague café. The last several days after work was over I spent solving programming challenges on runcode.ninja and I thought it would be nice to share my experience and spread the word about it.

RunCode.ninja

I can’t really recall how I discovered this website in the first place… All I remember is that I was really into the simplistic idea of it all. The basic idea for most of the challenges goes something like this:

• check problem description
• inspect any sample input (if any)
• write your program locally
• test on sample input (if any)
• submit source code to the evaluation platform

If all went well, you will get feedback within a few seconds whether the submitted code worked correctly for the given task at hand. If it didn’t, then you can turn to their FAQ for some advice. It definitely has some useful info, however if all else fails, you can also contact the team behind the platform on their slack channel. They are really friendly people so be sure to respond to their effort in kind!

Another nice thing about their platform is that they categorized all their challenges (119 in total as of now) into nice categories such as binary, encoding, encryption, forensics, etc. which allows you to select what you are interested in. When I started out, I was first aiming to complete the challenges in Easy which offers a combination of relatively easy challenges from math, text-parsing, encoding and other categories.

As it currently stands, I rank 155 our of around ~2400 registered users, which seems quite impressive at first, but I suspect there may be quite a few inactive accounts in their database. Also, there are some hardcore people who have already completed all their challenges that seems quite impressive. If only a few rainy and cold weekends I could spend working on these, I would probably catch up soon!

Last but not least, their platform is set up to interpret a several different programming languages, so you can choose to solve them in the language you are most comfortable with. Once you solve a challenge, you can access its write-ups which provide some very useful inspiration on how others have solved the same problem. This can provide some very valuable lessons, like that one time when I wrote a Go program that was 20 lines long to solve a challenge that took only 1 line into solve in Bash…

If you are interested to check out my solutions for some of the challenges, you can find them in my GitHub repository. For some of them I even created two different solutions, one in Python and another Go, just to compare and practice working with both languages.

Oh and I almost forgot to mention, they have some really cool stickers that they are not shy to send half-way across the world by post, so that’s another big plus for sticker fans :)

That’s all for now, thank you for tuning in! :)