The Other Secret:
A great circle of influence.
More often than not, a single code problem has many different solutions. The better solutions are not always obvious.
A good engineer can solve a problem. A great engineer knows why the solutions works. A phenomenal engineer goes beyond the basics — they know the elegant approach, they know the other approaches, and their trade-offs. done.
At CodeCrafters, you’re solving a problem, but you’re also taking inspiration from other’s approaches — and constantly expanding your perspective.
The Redis challenge was extremely fun. I ended up having to read Redis protocol specification doc pretty carefully in its entirety! The result felt like lightly-guided independent study, if that makes sense. (Which, again, was lots of fun)
Charles Guo
Scala Team at Stripe