What is it?

The Google Foobar Challenge: Google’s secret process of hiring developers and programmers all over the world, by invitation only. Invitations are offered to individuals who search for certain programming terms in Google, or can be found as easter eggs in Google page elements. (I’ve heard Google Doodles sometimes hold links.) As far as I can tell, Google no longer uses the Foobar Challenge to hire developers, but this should be a fun challenge for development and growth.

Foobar Login

The Challenge

The challenge is 5 levels of algorithm problems, increasing in difficulty as the levels progress, to foil Commander Lambda’s evil plans, rescue all the bunnies, and save the galaxy. The challenge takes place in a shell interface that you can interact with using standard commands like ls and cd.

My Invitation

I had been having rendering issues with the nbconvert package for about a month, where my Jupyter Notebooks would not successfully write to PDF. Either the code cells would render or the markdown would render, but not both. I needed both for a report I needed to submit for a Master’s class and WebPDF was not going to cut it for the final version that was due.

As I was working through Googling and resolving the various errors I was getting from nbconvert, this message popped up at the top of my browser window.

Want to Play?

The message reads “You’re speaking our language. Up for a challenge?”.

Curiously, I clicked “I want to play” to open a new tab and went about my business trying to get my report to render. It was due in less than 24 hours.

I circled back to the tab when I was trying to clean up my browser a few days later, and found a terminal shell with the welcome message: “Success! You’ve managed to infiltrate Commander Lambda’s evil organization, and finally earned yourself an entry-level position as a Minion on her space station. From here, you just might be able to subvert her plans to use the LAMBCHOP doomsday device to destroy Bunny Planet. Problem is, Minions are the lowest of the low in the Lambda hierarchy. Better buck up and get working, or you’ll never make it to the top…”