From The Challenges - IRC Client
Exploring the software engineering lessons we can learn from the solutions I've seen.
Hi this is John with this week’s Coding Challenge.
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Welcome To Coding Challenges - From The Challenges!
In this Coding Challenges “from the challenges” newsletter I’m sharing some of the common mistakes I see software engineers make when tackling the Coding Challenges.
I’m sharing both the mistakes people make and some thoughts on how you can you avoid making the same mistakes when taking on the coding challenges or when writing software professionally. Sometimes we have to make mistakes to learn from them, somethings we can learn from other people’s mistakes, then make our own new ones! 😀
Build A Redis Server Clone: Master Systems Programming Through Practice - Date and Earlybird Discount.
I’m running the Coding Challenges Live Redis course again in March and you can get up to 30% off until Monday 10th March! See below for details.
It is a live course that runs for two working weeks from March the 24th to April 4th. During the course you’ll implement from scratch a clone of the original Redis server and extend it to support the RESP2 protocol and some additional commands.
This course touches on a wide variety of topics that are applicable to general programming, for example:
👉 Parsing skills. These can be applied to a variety of problems including data munging, scraping, protocol implementation and more.
👉 Understanding network programming. This can be applied to making more robust, secure and scalable distributed systems.
👉 Experience handling concurrency and parallelism in software. Giving you the core skills to build scalable distributed systems.
👉 Testing. Network servers are complex system software with components that can interact in non-trivial ways. Figuring out how to test them is a challenge. You’ll explore unit and integration testing.
This course is entirely project focused. The goal of the course is not just to learn how to write a server, but also how to approach the problem of server software. Part of the course involves group discussion about problem decomposition, coding techniques, design tradeoffs, testing, and other related topics. The rest of the time is spent working on individual coding.
You might not think that you're ready to write a server, but if you've been coding for a while and know the basics of data structures, it's something that you can tackle. No prior background in network servers is required although awareness of common programming language concepts (e.g., types, functions, classes, scoping rules, etc.) is strongly advised.
If you are a paid subscriber you can get 30% off - please visit the paid subscriber benefits page for the code. If you are a free subscriber you can get 20% off if you sign up here (code: EARLYBSS) or you could subscribe now! 😀
You can read all about the course here: https://codingchallenges.fyi/live-courses/redis
If you have any questions, please hit reply and ask away.
Recapping The IRC Client Coding Challenge
In the build your own IRC client coding challenge the goal was to build and IRC client. IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat. IRC was one of the earliest network protocols for messaging and multi-party discussions.
Back before the days of Slack, MS Teams or Discord, IRC was how we had group discussions on the Internet. IRC is much less popular these days, but still alive and well in some online communities.
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Five Common Mistakes Software Engineers Make Solving the IRC Client Coding Challenge
I’ve pulled together this list of common mistakes from the hundreds of submissions I’ve been sent privately and the many shared in the Coding Challenges Shared Solutions GitHub Repo.
Mistake 1 - Not Parsing The Protocol
When handling a protocol, build a parser for it. Don’t try to handle it with regular expressions. Building a parser will be more robust, easier to extend and maintain, and easier to test.
In the case of IRC it’ll also be easier to build and reason about as the RFC specifics the protocol in augmented BNF (Backus-Naur Form - a notation that describes a formal grammar used when creating parsers) making it relatively easy to translate to a parser.
If you’re not sure how to write a parser check out my Interpreter course where I’ll cover writing one for a programming language or the Redis course where we look at it specifically from the point of view of parsing a network protocol (RESP).
Mistake 2 - Hard Coded Server And Port
Hard coding the server and port into your client means it can only be used to connect to a single server. That’s not only pointless, it also misses the benefit of the IRC network.
IRC is design to be distributed and resilient. Each network consists of several servers and the clients can connect to any server and ‘chat’ to any of the clients on the network whichever server they are connected to.
It also means that if a server is down, you can simply connect to a different server. So don’t hard code the server and port in your IRC client, or any other network client. It makes them far less useful.
Mistake 3 - Magic Numbers
A magic number is a unique value with no obvious meaning. Magic numbers are one of the oldest anti-patterns in software programming. They’re a problem because they obscure the programmer’s intent.
Instead of magic numbers it’s better to use named constant variables, where the name makes it clear what the constant refers to. For example, consider these two equivalent calls:
socket(2, 1, 0)
socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, PF_INET)Hopefully you’ll agree the second is clearer and if you’re familiar with socket programming you’ll know immediately what it means, unlike the first.
Mistake 4 - Long Functions
The longer a function is the harder it is to reason about. The harder it is to reason about the harder it is to review for correctness or test.
It doesn’t stop there though, once a function gets over 20-30 lines of code it becomes impossible for most of us to ‘hold’ all the context in our heads. We therefore struggle to reason about it and are more likely to introduce bugs when we change it.
For that reason I recommend keeping functions short, ideally less than 20ish lines of code. Note I added ‘ish’, because you need to think about this. If the function is 25 lines long and does one clear well defined thing it’s probably fine as one function, whereas breaking it into two or three other functions might create a bigger increase in cognitive load.
Mistake 5 - Unused And Unnecessary Dependencies
Dependencies are a potential source of bugs, instability and an attach vector for bad actors.
When building software try to keep your dependencies to a minimum.
Don’t install any that you don’t need.
Don’t install any that aren’t well known.
Don’t install them from a non standard source.
Don’t install any that offer no advantage over the programming language’s standard library.
Pin all the dependencies so the behaviour is consistent.
Where possible keep a local mirror of the dependencies, so if an upstream source is compromised or unavailable you are still able to build and deploy safely.
Request for Feedback
I’m writing these coding challenges and this new from the challenges series to help you develop your skills as a software engineer based on how I’ve approached my own personal learning and development.
What works for me, might not be the best way for you - so if you have suggestions for how I can make these challenges more useful to you and others, please get in touch and let me know. All feedback greatly appreciated.
You can reach me on Bluesky, LinkedIn or through SubStack
Thanks and happy coding!
John
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