Developers have always thought of themselves as a special club that stand out from the crowd. Coders usually rank themselves based on skill set and how well they can perform difficult tasks. That is why hackers garner respect in the developer communthey’d use to their ability to do what most others think is impossible. Some developers take pride in the fact that they work on very difficult programming problems or areas that no one has ever explored before. However, up until now there has been no exact way of showing others how good a developer is, something CodeWars is about to change.
CodeWars is a gamified competition that puts developers up against each other in a battle of skills. As contestants complete set tasks they get points and are ranked based on that number. The participants get a “hacker score” which basically quantifies their abilities and may be an interesting metric for employers to look at before hiring a developer. CodeWars plans to use the drive most coders have to be the best and show off their skills to fuel participation. The chance to solve an important technical challenge may be something that many developers will be unable to resist.
Anyone can gain access to the CodeWars application process during the beta period and the ones that clear the procedure will be granted access. The application consists of three Katas or test in the JavaScript programming language.Participants will then need to answers some questions relating to experience and skills. Finally the applicant will submit their GitHub account. Each action gives them points and the ones with the most points get listed on “the Honorable.”
CodeWars got its start two weeks ago and has seen a lot of interest from the hacker community. Even though it is in private beta, the link to the site was at the top of the Hacker News message board with 88 points and 67 comments. Within 2 days the site had 10,000 unique visitors and users had already taken a stab at 34,000 challenges or “Katas”. Interestingly, 66 percent of these early users have four or more years experience while 25 percent had more than ten years of experience.
CodeWars was founded in July during a Los Angeles Startup Weekend by its CEO Nathan Doctor – who looks surprisingly like Adrien Grenier – and CTO Jake Hoffner – who if you squint a little, isn’t that dissimilar from a skinnier Jerry Ferrara, aka “Turtle.” But that’s neither here nor there.
Doctor and Hoffner set up the site in July and think they can stand out from the crowd of gamified coding sites. They believe that their crowdsourcing approach to solving development and programming problems will cut the time it takes to solve independently. The company can also make money in two major ways. It can give companies access to the score of each developer to rank their skills or they can be a skills marketplace for hard working developers.
Source: PandoDaily