I hope I'm Holland in that example by the way! 
Your profile says Belgium 
I'm much more a problem solving coder than the other type! 
My favorite hobby of all time was debugging 68k code in order to hack some Amiga games copy protection.
I'm NULL at gfx and/or music creation.
Well, anyway, problem solving coding is a much faster way to check if the coder good or not...
I hope I'm Holland in that example by the way!
Your profile says Belgium I do live there indeed, but I wouldn't call myself their best ambassador! 
I'm one of those Dutchies who refuses to integrate!
I'm much more a problem solving coder than the other type!
My favorite hobby of all time was debugging 68k code in order to hack some Amiga games copy protection.
I'm NULL at gfx and/or music creation. Well, I wouldn't call hacking games or debugging problem solving. This I can do, although it can also be quite boring at times. What I meant to say is I find math-like-problems hard to solve, particularly on Z80.
Well, anyway, problem solving coding is a much faster way to check if the coder good or not...Depends on your definition of good. I couldn't calculate PI if you paid me to do it, but I could prolly code a game engine like Xak Gazzel in a couple of weeks. It's really a matter of what you like to do and how you approach these things.
cracking a copy protection is a good challenge! 
Good is always a personal point of view. Tetris was probably not a real though coding challenge when it was first made, but I still think Alexey Pazhitnov a genius on game design!
For me, good, in coding is: tough coding, like Pi calculation in z80 asm, but that, of course, just in my humble opinion.
*PS* How long it should take until some HUMBLE z80 coder copy & paste here some nice z80 asm code that calculates pi digits?
cracking a copy protection is a good challenge!
Good is always a personal point of view. Tetris was probably not a real though coding challenge when it was first made, but I still think Alexey Pazhitnov a genius on game design!
For me, good, in coding is: tough coding, like Pi calculation in z80 asm, but that, of course, just in my humble opinion.Well, I guess it's a personal point of view indeed. For me, a good coder is someone who really knows how to work the hardware. Get the most out of something with the least effort and resources. A good coder is creative! Anyhoo, I appreciate stuff like Akin or Metal Limit more than I would a fractal generator which is prolly 'harder' to code than the first. The first examples take balls and creativity to code, the last just oodles of time and some mathematical insight.
PS* How long it should take until some HUMBLE z80 coder copy & paste here some nice z80 asm code that calculates pi digits?
Well, if you'd have to wait for me, about 17 years. Good thing I'm not humble!
How hardware works is crucial for demos, but, IMHO, for actual games, it is by far more
important to have good general coding skills.
An accurate planning of data structures is crucial in order to represent the game in
a fast and accurate way, another crucial thing is to segment the code in functions
that can be easily debuged and that are general and meaningfull:
in other words usually software enginereeing is more important than hardware tweaking
when working on games and general applications (except than for demos)
At least in my case, projects born around HW tweaking do not arrive to a final stage due to
bad coding and planning.
Usually in those cases I restart the project from scratch (or drop it)
[edit]
Actually, in my case either good projects do not arrive to the end, but this is due to my lazyness
