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So I’ll keep track on my own blog I guess and see how far along I get.

Problem 1:

If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23.

Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.

And my solution, in PHP:

$sum = 0;

for($i = 0; $i < 1000; ++$i)
{
  if(!($i % 3) || !($i % 5))
  {
    $sum += $i;
  }
}
echo number_format($sum);

Answer: 233,168

There used to be a bunch of crappy php scripts on this site. I took them down. Here’s why…

1. They were crappy.

2. They were time-consuming to support.

3. They were crappy.

4. They were time-consuming to support.

First, the crappiness. I learned PHP in 2001 in order to create a baseball stats tracking application for my MSBL team. Statrat, as it was known, was my first PHP “application”. It worked, but the code was inelegant, imprecise and probably unsecure. But it worked, and lots of people downloaded and used it (and are still using it I guess). All of those people also wanted me to support it, and to help them install it, and to fix bugs and make it work on their machines and …. well, it was more and more time consuming.

I also created several other “applications” for personal use and various other utility scripts that I made available. All told, I was getting a fair bit of traffic and it was all taking more and more time to support, though I continually had less and less time to offer. I put up a forum to offload some support, set up CVS and a build system, and I added Google ads and a PayPal donation button for some ROI. I made about $100/year from the ads and got about $80 in donations over 3 years but the support costs (in time, money, sanity) just kept growing.

Not ever having time to re-implement the code, the works just stagnated, and when I would apply for a PHP job, employers would google my name and find this repository of crappy code. I really think it hurt me in the job search, which is ever-ongoing.

So I took them all down, let my Hotscripts entries lapse (which drove much of the traffic), and just went silent for about 6 months. Perhaps I’ll put them all back up, unsupported, with a link to this explanation. Perhaps not, I’m sure no one missed them. I don’t.