I’m teaching a cloud course and I gave the students a task to do. I also now have to go through about fifty projects and evaluate them. I might not have thought this one through .

What is interesting is the approaches that I’m seeing to solve the problem.

There is a wide disparity in the amount of code that people write. Sometimes by an order of magnitude. The students can chose any language, but in practice they almost all chose either Python or Node.  There were very few that used Java (and wow that was painful to read). Two people submitted Java code. One of them gave me a single file, under 100 lines of code. The other gave me a project with 12 files (repository, service, controller, etc) and over 600 lines of code.

Then there were the people who zipped node_modules and sent it over. My poor hard disk… One guy send a zip file that is 173 MB in size, which I’m afraid to look at (it looks like he included terraform.exe and multiple copies of node_modules!).

At any rate, the reason for this post is that among the ~50 home work assignment, there was one that really shined. Not only did the student explain their reasoning in clear and concise manner, they were able to look at the problem from another angle, drastically simply the entire work and avoid a whole set of common pitfalls. They were also able to do that in about 75 lines of code and most of that was required boilerplate.

I just had to go and find the docs to some obscure Python library to figure out how someone can write a solution to the problem in one tenth of the code that everyone else did and do that while behind correct, faster (they implemented caching, which very few did) and much simpler to read and understand. I’m impressed enough to write a blog post about it, after all.

I went over about fifty of assignments, and this one was a pure nugget to keep me slogging through things. There were bugs in the code, mind you, but the architecture and the approach were solid.