fanatic girl coder certification
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Hi! I'm Diana López and i'm from Colombia. Today I reached my goal of solving 85 problems in Code Abbey, so i guess now i'm a Fanatic girl coder. It has been a long and difficult road since I started programming a few months ago in my introductory computer science class at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and most of the time in class, I felt frustrated and really hated programming. It's hard, even more so in a sexist world or with teachers who tell you you're not good enough. Still, I made it this far. To the girls reading this, you can do it! :)
Diana, Hi!
Thanks for you devotion - and sharing your story. Honestly I'm not sure the IT world is really so sexist (at my current job both department head and my team lead are girls) - but what really makes difference is hating/loving programming.
It's not bad to hate it - rather quite normal :) just different people may have different interests. And it is important to choose the right way and purse the career you don't hate too much :)
We are ready to proceed with your diploma, just one question. I quickly browsed your solutions and it seems that starting from june your coding style dramatically changed - both in factorizing the code and even in using English instead of Spanish in identifiers. Have you switched to using some code-generation tool like ChatGPT?
It's not critical, but if you decide on the second thought that you are not ready to call some part of your work really your work, perhaps you'll prefer to postpone your request for certificate until you feel it is really deserved (e.g. by solving more problems by your own skill). You know, fair win brings ten times more joy after all.
Feel free to share your thoughts, I don't have neither magic nor intention to investigate the situation :) so if you say "Go on, all this code is mine" I'll made no further objections. Perhaps actually you just got some insight about improving your coding style from some friend or colleague etc...
To the girls reading this, you can do it!
That's true :) for example the girl I know from university started here (we had then only one certificate for 125 problems) and now she is Lead QA-automation engineer, she taught her husband the same profession and they both relocated to some nearby country for change in lifestyle and improve in salaries :)
Hi ChatGPT: "You are given an array of values to sort. Implement insertion sort in python and return how many elements of the array were shifted at each pass." :)
Mathias, thank you for the hint :) You know I currently have no proper access to ChatGPT but DeepSeek seems to generate the same code when provided with the phrase you suggest.
I wonder do people actually try to re-phrase problem statement or just put it "write code for the problem described by this page". And I also wonder where LLMs scoop the sources for solutions - do they actually carefully crawl over all the internet and github or sites like rosetta-code have greater weight assigned and are the main source...
A prompt such as "Write a python program to solve the problem at https://www.codeabbey.com/index/..." is enough to generate code that is spookily similar to some of the submissions.
My take: put some effort in to disguise the fact that you've used an LLM ;), or better be honest and quote the source by adding a comment such as 'Generated with xyz', or even better actually solve the problem yourself.
Hi! i already remake those two problems that i did with gpt help. Once a week, i have a meet with my friend from india, and he teach me and make me corrections (for that reason, i'll continue using english variables once a week). However, i don't need the certification anymore.
Diana, we all are greatly enjoyed by your decision to show will and courage to continue!
Feel free to ask for advice on problems - you see we have Python gurus here and sometimes getting hints from them - or just looking at their code may teach us new valuable tricks!