I don’t post on the forums as much as I should, but I’ve clashed and competed with a lot of you by this point, and I have a very long list of “thank you’s” to give… too long to list here. But if you’ve ever created one of the challenges, or even just allowed others to “view code” on a Clash… thanks! You’ve been part of helping me to finally learn python during 2022!
I want to draw a lot more people to Codingame, so I’m starting a Code Club at the college I work at, and also doing tutorials on YouTube.
What I’m most excited about at the moment is that @_CG_ClementHammel, the new Product Manager, has agreed to give me an interview for my channel!
To make sure my questions represent the diverse Codingame community, I’ve listed them in this Google doc and enabled comments. Please let me know how I can improve the questions, and tell me what you wish I was asking, but that I didn’t think to.
Hi RogersMath, great initiative. I would ask many things:
The future of contests, do they plan to keep doing multi player bot contests?
How do they monetize contests ? Or don’t they… ? Will they ever charge users participating in contests ?
Will the chat ever come back ? Are in game private messages a possibility ?
What is the business model of codingame ? Are companies hiring good codingame developers ? For instance, I have a good ranking and usually decent contest performances and never got contacted by a company.
It’s a detail, but I’d like to know if they plan to add more codegofl puzzle, because there are only 4 codegolf puzzle on CG.
I also have a suggestion. A lot of user don’t know it, but there are private messages in the forum (with 2, 3, 4, as many people as you want). We just need notifications on the main page. The suggestion is to add notification when you receive a private message in the forum.
Yeah, if there’s a threshold to reach or something to focus on in order to be eligible/marketable for companies to reach out to you, maybe the CG team can give some advice on that.
Routine chat and strong communication in general are super important factors for maintaining the relationships and friendships that bind a community. I will definitely ask about these features, great idea.
It’s funny because I almost thought for a time that I was doing something wrong or needed to unlock more puzzles in order to get additional Code Golf opportunities, ha! It’s definitely strange that an entire category only has four options. Especially because they can’t be nearly as hard to set up as the multiplayer bot contests.
Thanks for the follow up @Remi, it’s encouraging to know people are interested! I just pinged Clement with a follow up email that he’ll either answer to arrange a Zoom link, or he can also respond here in the thread.
I thought about the questions further, and reworded all of them below in a way that I hope will get closer to the target of things we’re all interested in knowing.
Hi @_CG_ClementHammel, we spoke a few months ago about doing an interview, and I’m still very interested.
In the meantime, I’ve been organizing a Code Club at the state college I work at, and have been introducing beginners to Clash of Code. Here’s the most recent recording of our club meetings.
I before that I did a video about the Fall 2022 Contest that got a decent number of views and a few more walkthroughs. I love the Codingame site so I plan to do a lot more content as I keep getting better at programming.
Some updated questions I wanted to ask are:
Hiring in the tech sector seems to be slowing and that may have an impact on interest in coding. According to similarweb.com, in countries with a lot of users like France, UK, and the US, monthly visits to Codingame seem to be down a bit. What does the team have planned to turn that around and grow the platform? What are some of the upcoming ideas and changes that Codingame players have to look forward to? Will there ever be a formal and regularly scheduled “Town Hall” interview forum where players can ask questions of the team the way I’m doing here?
Good workers want to be found just as much as good employers want to find us. Even so, there are players ranked in the top 50 who are still never getting contacted by employers. To help make sure we’re practicing the right things and to make life easier both for recruiters and players, what would you think of periodically giving Codingamers recommended lists of specific sets of challenges that employers on your platform are looking for? For example, Employer 1 is searching for candidates who know {BFS, Python, Monte Carlo, Pathfinding, C++, and are top ranked in Card Games, so here’s a list of recommended competitions and puzzles}, Employer 2 is searching for candidates fluent in {Javascript, Genetic Algorithms, and Ruby so we recommend X,Y,Z}, etc…
Why was in-game chat removed, and what would need to happen for it to return?
Has there ever been talk of a paid bootcamp or premium/subscription games, or is the intention to keep all the content zero cost?
I prefer to talk over Zoom and am available most weekends so let me know what’s good for you. If you can only do M-F right now that’s okay, I’ll also post those questions to the forum and will tag you, so you also have the option of answering there.
Thank you for make arrangements for the interview! I’ll be very interested to hear how Clement views his role in the CodinGame community, especially when he’s supposed to be the replacement of Thibaud, who held the (now-removed?) role of Community Manager.