I would like to start by applauding your initiative. Your team has created a really cool site that has this viral feel to it. I got addicted from my first shot. Since I love python, my first competition was the Pythonist2 challenge, I loved it. I believe it went downhill from there for me.

I am currently doing the week of code competition and found a bug that basically threw me out of the competition. Your test cases are not independently run. At least not for python!

For those who are reading this and unfamiliar with this particular Hackerrank competition. You submit your answer, your answer is run against a basic test set, if it passes you get full marks, FOR TODAY. Then tomorrow a new set of tests are run, and that keeps happening for a week. It is really great at keeping you on your toes.

What sucks is when you start scratching at why these new test cases are not passing. So what I did was, wrap my python code snippet in a Huge def.

And the code passes! The ugly part is that since I re-edited the code it no longer gets the top score and the time taken to submit the solution now has a few days on it.

I am not sure if I will be going through the rest of the competitions I signed up for. Not even sure if I will finish this one, seems like the competition part of it out the door.

I guess you guys fixed these gotchas for the pythonist2 challenge, except of course, your version of python3 didnt properly print unicode, I had to do tricks to get it to work! Thats for a different blog post / letter i guess. I did notice though that now python3 was disabled for that challenge (Tisk Tisk).

Anyways wish you all the best, and hope you guys make a kick ass platform that doesn’t kill the heart of the competition.

— Pykler