This is a list of the best sites on the net for practicing your coding chops, showing off your programming skills, and competing for fame and fortune. Exercise your brain by untangling obfuscation, applying algorithms knowledge, growing your inner math geek, or playing a bit of code golf.

Open source projects can be a good way to geek out and do what you love, and having a side project can help improve overall job satisfaction, keep you at the top of your hacking game, and can often lead to other opportunities. The problem is a lot of people have trouble making that [...]

The Eternity 2 (E2) puzzle has attracted the attention of puzzle fanatics, computer programmers, and mathematicians for many reasons, not the least of which is the $2 million prize for being the first to solve it. E2 is an edge-matching puzzle with 256 pieces. The general class of edge-matching puzzles [...]

This is a Common Lisp code walkthrough for generating original jokes. You seed the generator with the knowledge about different objects, and it uses that vocabulary to generate unique jokes. All of the jokes are of the form: “What do you get when you cross X with Y?” This code was originally [...]

I was looking for a Wordpress plugin to spice up comments with custom avatars, but I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for. So I hacked together the Ravatar Wordpress plugin that will display a randomly generated avatar for each visitor. The icons are based on email, so a given [...]