Not everyone works at the same speed, but for certain types of problems and industries, knowing that you can put out reasonable quality work in a reasonable amount of time helps people get an idea of how to plan out other parts of the project.
I'd rather know someone can do fizzbuzz in a few minutes vs 8 hours.
I guess that after Benjamin Stein and I discussed the problem and one of us (I can't remember whom) said "I wish there was an and-and-dot operator in Ruby," there was a rough implementation written fairly soon after.
But the thing on my Github now probably has a hundred hours of work refactoring, dealing with edge cases, adding new functionality like .andand { |foo| ... } and so on. I wouldn't be surprised if the LOC/hr. has dropped below one at this point. And that's without considering the rewrite_rails version which uses AST rewriting.
So for that purpose, I agree that a fizzbuzz given on the spot is far superior to looking at someone's Github projects. Thanks for the valuable comment.
1. Do you look at my github and wonder whether I wrote it or copied it from elsewhere?
2. What do you care if anything I wrote took me ten minutes or ten hours? And with rewrite_rails, the answer is more like ten months. Is that a problem? Are you looking for LOC/hour or for a certain approach to thinking about programming?
3. A trivial coding problem will not answer this question any more than Github will, but you can always just ask: "Reg, I'm looking at Faux, and I wonder, what other approaches did you consider before settling on pushing application logic down into the browser?"
4. See above.
5. "Reg, #andand seriously sucks. This is pervasive nil checking dressed up in metaprogramming clothing with opening core classes as a third deadly sin. Before I consign your soul to the abyss, what do you have to say in your defense?"