Project Euler #912: Where are the Odds?

I've been thinking recently about how things like Project Euler, LeetCode, and to a bit less of an extent, Advent of Code, are so heavily focused on making clever use of math, data structures and algorithms, that it makes them suboptimal as a tools for getting familiar with a new programming language.

I know that that critique isn't new to anyone but it makes me think about how it would be cool if there were a code puzzler site that is specifically geared towards little self-contained tasks that are more to do with forcing you to get familiar with the common everyday tasks of software development.

Some example puzzlers could be like:

- open an http server on port 80

- open a file and write this data to it

- write temporary files to a location, deleting them when process exits

- query a database

- deal with such and such error scenario

- find a way to test this component

- bundle this code as an executable

- sanitize user input here

- make this behavior configurable

- take the config from environment variable variable and/or config file and/or arguments

- parse this data file

You do get a bit of parsing and file handling with Advent of Code but imagine a series of dozens of small problems that grill you on every corner of the python filesystem api. Would be a lot less dry than reading docs cover to cover.

Something I'd love to see is "AoC hard mode": the exact same problems but the input data set is ~10 GB, and/or similarly "scaled" such that naive solutions fail outright.

Other scaling-of-inputs could include: Text with line-lengths over 2 GB, numbers above 2^60, data designed such that naive nested-loop solutions (quadratic scaling) take over a year to compute the answer, etc...

Basically, force developers to solve the problem robustly with: streaming, parallelism, efficient algorithms with good big-O properties, correct data type choice (including intermediate accumulator values!), and so forth.

It could be a three-star challenge feature added to the current version. It wouldn't even require large downloads: a Python script or something similar could be used to generate arbitrarily large inputs. (Alternatively, a common CDN-cacheable prefix with a distinct suffix per competitor.)