educative.io

Why the quality of code is pretty bad compared to the old grokking series?

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#1

Code quality is really bad in all the grokking series including the UI. I never expected the educative course quality be this pathetic, i wouldnt have taken up the annual premium if i had known this before. If people follow these kind of code practices then surely they are gonna fail in the interviews.

#2

And most of the problems rely on index(accessing a specific element) based, any specific reason for providing all the inputs are of type List which takes o(n) complexity for accessing specific elements?

#3

Hi there!

Thank you for your feedback.

It is indeed an oversight on our part that inefficient list processing has been used in some solutions. We are working to fix all the instances of this issue that we have identified, and the changes will be live in about a week’s time.

Regarding your general comment about the quality of code and the UI, could you provide some specific feedback in both areas? We’d love to learn from you and improve our content and product for all of our learners.

Best,
Aman

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#4

Thanks for the acknowledgement and addressing the concerns, that’s a great positive sign, kudos to the team.

Some of the pitfalls I could see in the code/course;

  1. modularity => many problems are not properly modularised, which gives the reader the feeling that it is the right way to program which is not true for both the interview and actual production level programming.
  2. Naming of constants => Most of the time, the constants do not have a meaningful name, which affects the readability of the code.
  3. Stack classes are not used in production. If a candidate uses them in the interview, the interviewer will feel that the candidate is less experienced.Also, it is recommended to use the Deque interface instead of Stack, as stated on the official page. Stack (Java Platform SE 8 )
  4. HashTable vs HashMap => Some programs uses HashTable and some uses HashMap, would it be good to call out the reasoning ( multiple threaded vs single threaded )?
  5. Lots of verbose => I do understand its definitely required to explain the algorithms properly, however its too verbose, it would be great if its written concisely or changing the content style.
  6. UI, verbose, and code make it harder to focus and less engaging/interesting to continue. It would have been a 5 star course if the presentation was better for reading, although the content is good.
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#5

Thank you so much! This is indeed very helpful feedback.

We will discuss internally in the team, and see which of these items we can deliver quickly, taking into account the severity of the issue and other work currently in progress.

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