The Eudyptula Challenge: Learn how to contribute to the Linux kernel | Hacker News Reader

The Eudyptula Challenge: Learn how to contribute to the Linux kernel

eudyptula-challenge.org

59 pointsnullflow11 comments

Since the page is not dated, I wanted to find out whether the challenge has just been released currently or not.

Inspecting HTTP headers gives a hint: Last-Modified: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 04:33:36 GMT

I think it's a great idea. I would rather a set of tutorials though. I don't want to email and waste somebody's time if I'm not able to commit to anything.

You're only wasting cpu cycles ... you're emailing a bot.

I see. In that case, why not just put the exercises online?

To get used to the kernel way of sending patches: email.

Gamification ... you need to "level up" to get new challenges.

Actually, it's processed by a script (a bot if you like), however, if something fails a person replies to you. This is the problem with many of the challengers. When everything is ok they proceed, when something fails[1] it might take weeks to get a reply.

[1]: failure might be because of a corner case or an implementation not working on a specific configuration.

The author _says_ that it's done by shell scripts, but in reality he's checking them by hand (i.e. in the coding tasks you get actual code review).

I tried this back in April:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616270

I liked the Matasano Crypto Challenges, but this was less informative. It's a list of tasks, not a tutorial. There weren't pointers to resources, either.

There were 20 tasks then, btw.

I'm running through these at the moment. Some challenges have really heavy queues (ie: Challenge 3 has an expected response time of 1 month at the moment. ~8000 challengers are participating out of an expected < 1000).

It's an interesting format.

I agree - I really like it and I'm learning a lot. However, i'm losing motivation due to the lengthy queue.

Task 6 currently has a two month wait. Given that you may have to submit multiple times to get feedback and fix mistakes, you're talking a significant part of a year to get a single task done.

I understand there's a massively unexpected surge of users, but I'd happily donate to help improve infrastructure (if donations were ever available)

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