Today, I had an interview where they sprung a Coderpad test on me out of the blue. It was for a Django position and because I spend most of my time in Django, I hardly ever use/practice a lot of the Python built-in (often string manipulation) functions.

So even though I am pretty experienced, I felt like a newbie just because the tasks (IMHO) are unrealistic, abstract tests that you'd rarely do in real life and hence, rarely practice. I mean, funnily enough, I have never had to find the longest list of zeros in a binary string in ANY of the >10 projects in my portfolio.

So for those of you who are a bit more practiced with Coderpad/Codility etc, what are some of the more useful functions?

For example, in my case I was lucky enough to quickly look up sorted() in the docs and see how it worked, how to reverse the ordering etc. I got away with and passed the interview but obviously it'd have been better to be familiar with it ahead of time. I suspect it's worth brushing up on list and dictionary comprehensions too.