A young friend of mine who’s just starting out in the world of programming and has ambitions of becoming a software engineer asked me for work experience today. I couldn’t think of anyway that could give him the support he needs (note: if you know of a company in Brisbane or surrounding areas that could provide some work experience for a year 11 student that’s starting out in programming please let me know – I think a September timeframe fits in with his school well). Instead I suggested he sink his teeth into any and every programming problem he could find. Naturally he asked me to suggest some and I figured while I’m at it I may as well publish them. So over the next few weeks or months I’ll be writing up some sample programming exercises along with some of my thoughts on how to go about solving them and posting them to the web. The first one’s available now. I’m sure there’s plenty of examples and tutorials around on the web but I wanted to take the contrived examples and make them a little more real world. As such, all the exercises will start with a semi-formal set of system requirements (similar to what most contractors are given) and a discussion of design techniques and other software engineering considerations is included. The examples are language agnostic and are intended to focus on giving problem solving and programming experience rather than learning a specific language. I’d love to hear of any other good resources people can point out as well as any comments on the examples – things to add, things to improve, things to cut out etc.