[python-advocacy] A Pythonic Way to Measure and Improve Your Programming Skills?

[Brad Allen]

At 6:05 AM -0600 3/9/07, Jeff Rush wrote:
>Prior to PyCon I'd been thinking about some kind of campaign, service or
>documents, that I call "So you think you know Python...".  My initial idea was
>for use by Python programmers, who are honest with themselves, to have a way
>to measure their knowledge.

A interactive Python skills test could be useful, fun, and popular, 
if designed well.
There are a lot of Python programmers who are serious about honing 
their skills,
and enjoy doing so.

Building a good interactive test is a big project; I hope we can get community
buy-in and participation for this idea. I'll volunteer to be a tester, and to
help with brainstorming ideas for content.

At 6:05 AM -0600 3/9/07, Jeff Rush wrote:
>I've been carefully watching Crunchy, about which a talk was given at PyCon,
>for writing tutorials that, with its "doctests" feature, could be used to
>propose tests that pass and require a candidate to write an acceptable
>program.

Crunchy has great possibilities, especially if we can find a good way to use
it on the web instead of requiring a download to run locally. However,
there is an obvious security problem with giving web users access to a Python
interpreter on the web server.

When I discussed this problem with Michael Bernstein at PyCon he suggested
the idea of creating a "chroot jail" for each web session which could run
the Python interpreter in a secure sandbox. That might be easier than giving
each session a whole virtual server.

Are there any experienced sysadmins reading this who know of a practical way
solve this problem so we can have Crunchy tutorials on the web?