OC.pm Coding challenge

The topic this month was the coding challenge supplied by OC.pm for their May 2017 meeting.

Two members of the group provided solutions to the problem. Julian Brown presented his solution in person. JD Lightsey was unable to make it to the meeting, but he sent his solution through G. Wade Johnson.

Julian started the meeting by explaining the challenge. He then showed the two scripts that he built to solve the problem. The first decoded the barcode data into the data needed to construct the image. The second script took the data, generated an image from that and attempted to decode the Morse code message. He reported that he did not finish the code needed to produce the final message.

Wade presented JD's solution to the problem. JD coded his solution as a single script. He also managed to complete the decoding of the Morse code and provide the output message.

We observed that these two senior developers approached the problem slightly differently. Comparing their solutions showed differences in the way they approach problem solving. There was one very interesting point that the two solutions had in common. They were simple exploration scripts solving the problem. There was no frameworks, large amounts of object oriented code, or test suites. Both developers showed that a simple solution was better for a throw-away script intended to solve a problem.

We had 7 people attending this month. As always, we'd like to thank HostGator, LLC for providing the meeting space and food for the group.