CppQuiz.org officially launched!

The Story (you can skip this part)

Back in April I went to the excellent ACCU 2013 conference. I had been playing with the idea for an online C++ quiz for a while, but decided I didn’t have the time to do it. Then, after a few glasses of wine at the conference dinner and a few more Bath Ales in the bar, I went to my room to get some sleep. But it couldn’t hurt to do a little bit of coding, could it? Add to that the train to London next day, and the plane to Oslo, and the first version of CppQuiz.org was born.

I spent a few more days on it this summer, and since then it has been functionality complete (enough) and stable, so today I removed the “beta” header. I also realised I had forgotten to blog about it, which is kind of silly. How to market a quiz about C++? What about on your own C++ blog?

What is it

CppQuiz.org is (as you might have guessed by now) an online C++ quiz. Each question is a full C++ program, and you are to figure out what its output is. I stole this format from Olve Maudal‘s pub quizzes, but with one major difference: While his quizzes are about what happens on his computer (which is very interesting for a more interactive format), CppQuiz.org asks about what the standard mandates the output to be. If the example code doesn’t compile, or has unspecified/undefined behaviour, you answer that.

The site will just keep throwing questions at you (training mode), optionally giving you a hint and finally give you a full explanation of the answer, with references to the C++11 standard. If you want, you can however start a new quiz (quiz mode), and get a fixed number of questions. At the end you get a score, and a link to give your friends to see if they can beat you. Neither mode requires you to register or log in.

How you can help

If you like the quiz and want to help, there are many ways to do so:

• Create your own questions, as many have done
• Help improve the design (pull requests, e-mail, Twitter)
• Help improve the functionality (pull requests, e-mail, Twitter)
• Any other feedback (comments to this post, e-mail, Twitter)

Thanks guys!

Finally I wish to thank a few people. Olve Maudal gives the world’s best C++ pub quizzes, and was my biggest inspiration for creating the site. He also has a fascinating, deep understanding of C and C++, and is an all-around great guy. He even sent me all his C++ quiz material to use for inspiration. See, I told you he is a great guy.

Several people have also contributed their own questions. KrzaQ2 did several, Lars Storjord and others also did. Mikael Kilpeläinen and Fernando Cacciola sent me some of their material. Jon Jagger, Peter Sommerlad, Björn Fahller and several other ACCU members provided good feedback. (I do hope you’re an ACCU member?) Oh, and Webfaction is a highly recommended hosting company. They don’t sponsor me or anything, but their customer service is the best.

Now go take the quiz!

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