Project Euler Forum

Hello!

Before I fully commit to a project idea of mine, I wanted to run this by you all to see if you think it would be a violation of the requirements of Project Euler (in regards to not sharing/discussing solutions outside of the official site).

I am a full-stack developer and would like to start building a website dedicated to documenting my journey in solving the first 100 problems. I envision this website will have a new post/entry for each problem I solve (similar to a blog). Each post will walk through my thought process as I worked through the problem, strategies I tried, pseudocode, references, what didn't work, proofs, etc. At no point would I publicize the solution anywhere in the post.

According to the "About" section of Project Euler, "the rule about sharing solutions outside of Project Euler does not apply to the first one-hundred problems, as long as any discussion clearly aims to instruct methods, not just provide answers, and does not directly threaten to undermine the enjoyment of solving later problems." My intention is to "instruct methods," but I think this may be erring on the side of "provid[ing] answers" and I wanted to make sure I wouldn't be violating any rules by publishing this site. Any github repos will remain private.

The purpose of this project is to continue to build my skills as a developer, and to make something that I will genuinely enjoy and appreciate.

Thank you! And if you have any suggestions, or thoughts on what to avoid (in order to not violate the rules), I would love to hear any and all ideas!

Hi, jazzloffredo. Thank you for taking the time to outline your plan. We think it is entirely reasonable. The About section says, "as long as any discussion clearly aims to instruct methods, not just provide answers". You are doing more than just providing answer by giving instruction and the thinking behind the approaches, which may be very useful to those working through the first 100 problems.

I'm guessing you will be providing source code? One option, rather than explicitly providing the answer to the problem, is to outline how your code satisfies test cases with answers to those given explicitly. Then leave the reader to either use your code or their own version to obtain the correct answer to the problem.

The rational for this it that there are going to be two types of people that will be reading your posts. Your perfect audience will be those who join you on your journey and learn with you. Then there will be those who are struggling with problem XX and will do a search. Upon finding your site they will hopefully learn how to solve the problem by reading your post. There will be a third type of person who just wants to enter the correct answer to every problem. They are neither respecting you and the effort you have put in to your posts in order to provide instruction, nor are they respecting what we believe Project Euler represents: a journey of learning and discovery.

But at the end of the day, if not providing the answer at the end of your post feels like it's missing something, then feel free to put it there. It's up to you.

Also keep in mind that not all problems are equal. Many have a great deal of learning attached to them and will lend themselves perfectly to the vision you have. Others, however, might be far more straight forward and not require the same level of instruction.

Good luck with your project and feel free to share a link here when you begin.