Current Quizmaster Retiring

Ruby
1

When I started the Ruby Q. project, I made some off-hand comment
along the lines of, “Surely I can keep it going for a couple of
years…” No matter how you measure, we have passed that goal.

The Ruby Q. has now run for over three years calendar time. If you
prefer to count quizzes released, we’re ten shy of three full years
of quizzes. That’s beyond anything I ever imagined.

I cannot properly express how much I’ve enjoyed running the quiz. It
is, quite literally, how I learned the Ruby programming language.
Summarizing the solutions each week had me reading through countless
examples of great code where I picked up idioms, learned new
algorithms, and just generally saw what good programming looks like.
That’s just what I personally got out of it.

Externally, the quiz grew well beyond my expectations. It spawned a
book, some of the quizzes have been translated into other languages,
and I’ve seen it referred to in many places as a terrific source of
“Getting Started with Ruby” projects.

I say it a lot, but I want to once again thank all who have
contributed to the quiz in any way. You have created an amazing
resource.

If there is a downside to running a project like this, it would have
to be that it eats time. I’ve automated the Ruby Q. as much as I
am able to, but it still takes several hours a week for me. That’s a
combination of all that it requires: generating quiz ideas, working
with contributors to get their ideas ready, preparing a problem for
release, collecting solutions as they come in, playing with the
solutions enough that I understand them, and summarizing what I saw.
I also try to participate in the discussions.

I’ve gladly maintained this continuing commitment, but I think we all
knew I couldn’t keep it up forever. I’m involved in many Ruby
projects now and I would like to give some of them the time and
attention I’ve given to the Ruby Q. these last three years.

Beyond the constraints of time, I’m running out of good quiz ideas.
The well isn’t bone dry just yet, but I’m sometimes scrambling to
keep the ideas flowing now.

Given all of that, I’ve decided that the end of my watch over the
Ruby Q. has come. I will run ten more quizzes, so we can say that
I covered three years no matter how the count is done. Quiz 156 will
be my last challenge.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking this means the quiz is winding
down. We’re going to have some great content in our last few months,
starting with this week’s problem which I think is great. We’re
going out at the top of our game like all the greats projects do.

My hope is that we’ll see a new quizmaster grab the reigns and launch
Ruby Q. 2.0. I often have to sit out problems I really want to
play in just because there isn’t enough free time left for solving
after running the show, so you could count on the fact that at least
one person here would be an active contributor. Besides, if you want
to learn a whole lot of Ruby voodoo, I can assure you there’s no
better way. Think it over.

I’ll close this long message now and get back to running the quiz.
Send me your great ideas for our homestretch run.

Thanks again to all quiz fans.

James Edward G. II

2

2007/11/9, James Edward G. II [email protected]:

Summarizing the solutions each week had me reading through countless
contributed to the quiz in any way. You have created an amazing

Ruby Q. has come. I will run ten more quizzes, so we can say that
play in just because there isn’t enough free time left for solving
James Edward G. II
James, thank you for the efforts you have put into this! I am
really surprised to hear that the quiz has been running for three
years now. Since I still clearly remember the first discussions
about creating this quiz this probably means I am a . Unfortunately I never managed
to try to solve quizzes as much as I would have liked to. Time is
tight on my side as well…

Thanks again!

robert

3

Yes, thank you James.
Ruby Q. has been and will (we hope) continue to be an invaluable
contribution to Ruby and simply to those wanting to learn and/or
improve their Ruby and/or their programming skills in general.

4

On Nov 9, 2007, at 10:15 AM, Dale M. wrote:

Ruby Q. has become a valuable tool to the community to teach Ruby to
newcomers and allow existing Rubyists to flex their programming skill.

That brings up a good point I forgot to mention.

All of the existing Ruby Q. material is going to stay right where
it is. I’m paid up on the domain for many years to come and it’s
piggybacked on my personal hosting account, so have no fear of it
disappearing anytime soon. It will continue to be a great tool even
if no new quizzes are run.

James Edward G. II

5

On Nov 9, 8:05 am, James Edward G. II [email protected]
wrote:

Given all of that, I’ve decided that the end of my watch over the
Ruby Q. has come. I will run ten more quizzes, so we can say that
I covered three years no matter how the count is done. Quiz 156 will
be my last challenge.

I’d like to echo the thanks of others. Having authored and summarized
just a few quizzes myself, I know how much time it takes all too well.
I’m frankly amazed at your dedication that you kept it going this
long.

As I see it, ongoing Ruby Q. requires:

  • New ideas for quizzes
  • Vetting of the quizzes (rejecting or improving bad ones)
  • Scheduling and running the Quiz itself
  • Interested parties actually solving the quiz
  • (Ideally) A good writeup/summary

I’d like to direct this thread to brainstorming on how to make this
feasible for the future.

For sure, the simplest solution would be to find a new quizmaster to
take the reigns. But even that would almost certainly be a temporary
solution. It seems to me that this should be possible (like many open
source projects) as a community effort with a small amount of steering
by a group of individuals.

Here’s what I envision/propose:

  • RubyQuiz.com (or RubyQuiz2.com, or whatever) has an interface where
    anyone can submit ideas for new quizzes. Perhaps a public wiki for
    editing the quiz text, or perhaps a login-based system where only the
    author can edit it. (Or perhaps an option that lets the quiz submitter
    choose if it’s publicly editable or not.)

  • Everyone can vote on upcoming quizzes, granting each a rating based
    on fun, estimated time to complete, difficulty level, and maybe even
    real-world applicability. Maybe there are flags for quizzes that
    involve performance optimizations, those that are about golfing, those
    that are NP-Hard and require heuristics, those that are about route-
    finding, and so on.

  • Possibly a small-ish group of admins is given the ability to change
    the scheduling of upcoming quizzes.

  • The application automates the posting of the quiz to the mailing
    list.

  • Ideally, the application monitors the gateway or ruby-talk archive
    for submissions with an appropriate topic and auto includes them in
    the listing of solutions and/or discussion. (Again, maybe admins have
    the ability to hand-pick posts to include.)

  • Although it would be nice for someone to volunteer to write up a
    summary, I’m not sure it’s necessary. The summary might be implicit in
    followup discussions about solutions held on the mailing list.

The potential downsides I see of this are:

  • Giving everyone visibility to upcoming quizzes takes a little bit
    away from the sense of competition. I like that everyone sees a quiz
    at the same time and starts working on it at the same time. It’s not
    really a race, but at the same time the flavor of the event changes (I
    think) if people can spend weeks programming for an upcoming quiz and
    then drop a crazy huge solution. I feel that it would discourage smal-
    time hackers.

  • When the responsibility is on everyone’s shoulders to submit
    quizzes, it may be that no one will step up. That would be
    disappointing, but not disastrous. If the queue is empty, there’s no
    quiz that week. Maybe even the system sends a polite encouragement to
    the list asking for submissions in lieu of a quiz.

The potential upsides I see of this are:

  • Seeing upcoming quizzes may give good ideas for interesting
    variations. I actually anticipate occasional interesting influxes that
    may queue up 10-20 quizzes at a time.

  • Voting for quizzes on multiple axes will record that information for
    newcomers to Ruby. Right now we say “Go browse the quiz site, and look
    for entries with lots of answers; they’re probably easy.” Wouldn’t it
    be cool to be able to view all solved quizzes and say “Show me the
    quizzes that probably only take about an hour, with a high rating of
    real-world applicability, and that are rated moderate or difficult to
    solve?”

I dunno how much of the above JEG II has already written for personal
administration, but I bet it would be a nice starting step.

6

On Nov 9, 9:52 am, Phrogz [email protected] wrote:

  • Giving everyone visibility to upcoming quizzes takes a little bit
    away from the sense of competition. I like that everyone sees a quiz
    at the same time and starts working on it at the same time. It’s not
    really a race, but at the same time the flavor of the event changes (I
    think) if people can spend weeks programming for an upcoming quiz and
    then drop a crazy huge solution. I feel that it would discourage smal-
    time hackers.

If others also feel that this would change the flavor too much, my
previous proposal could be modified as such:

  • Everyone can submit ideas, but they can only ever see their own
    idea. They may carry on a conversation (on the site) with the site
    admins about how to improve the quiz.

  • Site admins (maybe a group of 10-15) can see all quizzes, and are
    the only ones who can vote/categorize quizzes.

This removes the fun of seeing a huge upcoming queue from everyone,
but keeps the surprise aspect of the quizzes.

7

James G. wrote:

Thanks again to all quiz fans.

James Edward G. II

James -

Thanks so much for everything you’ve done. Your site basically taught me
the language and your attitude on the site and quiz reviews has been a
major influence on the great culture of the ruby community today.

Thanks again and let’s hope someone worthy will take up the site after
you’ve left.

  • Drew
8

On Sat, 2007-11-10 at 00:05 +0900, James Edward G. II wrote:

The Ruby Q. has now run for over three years calendar time. If you
prefer to count quizzes released, we’re ten shy of three full years
of quizzes. That’s beyond anything I ever imagined.

Thanks, James, for all the work you’ve done on this! And the book (*)
is great; it’s a wonderful set of lessons in Ruby idioms. Thanks again,

Yours,

Tom

(*) Pragmatic Bookshelf: By Developers, For Developers

9

Message.new(“Simply, thanks.”).sendTo(:James)

On the future of RubyQuiz… I almost jumped up, waving my arms, to
say, “Pick me! Pick me!” Then my brain kicked in…

Seriously, though, I think I could manage much of what James has done,
perhaps with a bit of help. I have plenty of webspace going unused in
a textdrive account, so could setup shop there. I have to run off at
the moment, so I haven’t read through Phrogz comments just yet, though
I will later…

In any case, gotta run at the moment, but will come back later to put
some an additional “too sense” in.

10

On Nov 9, 2007, at 10:55 AM, Phrogz wrote:

I’d like to echo the thanks of others. Having authored and summarized
just a few quizzes myself, I know how much time it takes all too well.
I’m frankly amazed at your dedication that you kept it going this
long.

Thanks to all of you for the kind words.

This is a side concern, but I do vote we split any new Ruby Q.
efforts off on a new domain.

I’ve tried building my own version two site in the past and one of
the issues with something like that is incorporating all of the old
material. It’s a pain and thus I vote we just don’t do it. It’s far
easier to just turn the old site into the archive for the old content
and have it link to current efforts.

  • Ideally, the application monitors the gateway or ruby-talk archive
    for submissions with an appropriate topic and auto includes them in
    the listing of solutions and/or discussion. (Again, maybe admins have
    the ability to hand-pick posts to include.)

I’ve tried to do this a couple of times now. It’s pretty dang
tough. Most of my problems came from wanting to extract the code
from the messages though, so if you avoid that it might not be so bad.

The potential upsides I see of this are:

  • Seeing upcoming quizzes may give good ideas for interesting
    variations. I actually anticipate occasional interesting influxes that
    may queue up 10-20 quizzes at a time.

The quiz has worked like this, though maybe not 20 at a time. We had
some terrific runs where I didn’t build a quiz for quite some time.

I dunno how much of the above JEG II has already written for personal
administration, but I bet it would be a nice starting step.

All of my old scripts are pretty tied to my current setup, so they
won’t be of much use. I’ve been wanting to replace them for a long
time now, so you’re definitely going to want to build new tools.

Of course, if you want to know about all the mistakes I made with my
setup, I have a lot to say about that. :wink:

James Edward G. II

11

On Nov 9, 9:05 am, James Edward G. II [email protected]
wrote:

Summarizing the solutions each week had me reading through countless
contributed to the quiz in any way. You have created an amazing

Ruby Q. has come. I will run ten more quizzes, so we can say that
play in just because there isn’t enough free time left for solving
James Edward G. II
JEG II,

Ruby Q. has become a valuable tool to the community to teach Ruby to
newcomers and allow existing Rubyists to flex their programming skill.
Your dedication of 3 years to this endeavor is much appreciated.

Thank you,
Dale M.

12

On Sat, Nov 10, 2007 at 02:44:14AM +0900, Matthew M. wrote:

Message.new(“Simply, thanks.”).sendTo(:James)

Oh, say, that’s rich. Golf your thanks to the quizmaster.

%!%sJEG1!.succ%%!thx!

_why

13

On 11/9/07, _why [email protected] wrote:

On Sat, Nov 10, 2007 at 02:44:14AM +0900, Matthew M. wrote:

Message.new(“Simply, thanks.”).sendTo(:James)

Oh, say, that’s rich. Golf your thanks to the quizmaster.

%!%sJEG1!.succ%%!thx!

_why

Oh why. why not make that the quiz of the week next week…

14

James,

Thanks for all your hard work!

-mental

15

On Nov 9, 10:05 am, James Edward G. II [email protected]
wrote:

I say it a lot, but I want to once again thank all who have
contributed to the quiz in any way. You have created an amazing
resource.

I’m actually in a book thanks to you. So, You Rock Dude! :wink:

Honestly, I am quite amazed at the level to which you were able to
take this whole idea. Simply incredible work!

Thanks James,

T.

16

Hmm, maybe I am not really a programmer. I can appreciate elegant code
(for my subjective definition of elegant) but I rarely struggle to
perfect my (or somebody else’s) code in my free time. For the three
long years I have been aware there’s a quiz running. Sure I have
looked at some quizzes that seemed particularly interesting, but I
haven’t contributed a single solution.

On the other hand, the exposure to programming has left some permanent
traces. You know, people who can understand programmer jokes are no
longer considered normal :wink:

I wonder why we have so many galleries with paintings and sculptures
but I haven’t heard of one displaying exceptional pieces of code.

Sure, I can browse the quiz site. However, the presentation is limited
by my not-so-large screen, and often a tool for presenting the results
of a quiz solution nicely would make for another quiz. And there’s no
guide who would explain peculiarities of particular programmer schools
and hint about the best masterpieces.

Well, maybe I just get weird ideas late in the night.

Good night, and thanks for all the quizzes

Michal

17

On Nov 9, 2007, at 5:14 PM, Michal S. wrote:

Hmm, maybe I am not really a programmer. I can appreciate elegant code
(for my subjective definition of elegant) but I rarely struggle to
perfect my (or somebody else’s) code in my free time. For the three
long years I have been aware there’s a quiz running. Sure I have
looked at some quizzes that seemed particularly interesting, but I
haven’t contributed a single solution.

This is off-topic and I’m obviously biased, but I really believe
anyone who has never tried a programming challenge should. You don’t
really think all those Ruby Q. solutions are built because we like
extra work, do you? You might be surprised to find that it can be
quite fun.

I wonder why we have so many galleries with paintings and sculptures
but I haven’t heard of one displaying exceptional pieces of code.

http://pragdave.blogs.pragprog.com/pragdave/2007/10/art-in-
programm.html#comments

James Edward G. II

18

Michal S. wrote:

I wonder why we have so many galleries with paintings and sculptures
but I haven’t heard of one displaying exceptional pieces of code.

Well, there may not be much code in museums, but there certainly are
plenty of ancient computing devices in them, including chunks of
Babbage’s creations, Pascal’s calculator, “Napier’s Bones”, and
calculating devices retrieved from shipwrecks in the Mediterranean that
date back before the birth of Jesus. Then there’s Stonehenge and the
Mayan calendar. :wink:

19

On Nov 9, 2007, at 10:05 AM, James Edward G. II wrote:

Given all of that, I’ve decided that the end of my watch over the
Ruby Q. has come. I will run ten more quizzes, so we can say
that I covered three years no matter how the count is done. Quiz
156 will be my last challenge.

Thanks ever so much for the three years of effort you have put in.
Ruby Q. has been both fun and very instructive. Special thanks for
the quizzes you personally authored and all your well-written
summaries. You have made a great contribution to the Ruby community.

My hope is that we’ll see a new quizmaster grab the reigns and
launch Ruby Q. 2.0. I often have to sit out problems I really
want to play in just because there isn’t enough free time left for
solving after running the show, so you could count on the fact that
at least one person here would be an active contributor. Besides,
if you want to learn a whole lot of Ruby voodoo, I can assure you
there’s no better way. Think it over.

I certainly hope we will be able to continue Ruby Q. is some form.
I would like the opportunity to continue participating, both as a
quiz author and solver – at least from time to time.

Regards, Morton

20

On Nov 9, 2007, at 11:03 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

and the Mayan calendar. :wink:
I saw the German “Enigma” in a museum last time I was in Washington
D.C. It was awesome.

James Edward G. II