About half a year ago I posted there announcement of my site CodeAbbey. Since then the site have been evolving by and by (many thanks to all people who provided invaluable hints and suggestions!) — and few of them looks funny enough to me so that I'm eager to tell a bit about two of them.

Certificates

They [are awarded] for certain achievements (currently for 125 problems) — and are shown in profile — though you can also print it and hang above your desk. Of course they are still useless papers, but they are somewhat funny I think:

Certificates bear unique number on them so that their authenticity could be verified on site. You may read more here about them.

Interactive problems

They were introduced recently — to solve the problem user is to play a kind of game against a server. HTTP Post requests are used for interchange (sample code fragments in Python are provided).

Currently there are only four such problems:

• Say 100 — simple test that you can work with HTTP;
• Nim Game — also simple but allowing several moves;
• Maze of the Wumpus — by the motives of old game — requiring a bit of heuristic I suppose;
• Connect Four — once popular tic-tac-toe-like game allowing to practice minimax algorithm.

Though of course I hope to add more in future — and to improve clumsy infrastructure of these games also, he-he :)

Concluding I'd say it appeared to be a funny matter to try building my own site, though small and puny. Besides other things it made me acquainted with several interesting people all around the world — I hope I'll be able to write about some of them later in separate posts.