Summary
There are many ways to go from being a beginner coder to someone with a bit of experience. If you don’t have a company where you’re able to intern, one of the most effective ways to level up your coding is through competitive online coding challenges. Let me explain.
What’s a Competitive Coding Challenge, Anyway?
Competitive coding challenges are a series of problems you have to solve in a programming language of your choice as quickly and efficiently as possible. In a coding challenge, you’ll probably run into things you know from the core basics of your learning. For example, we covered data structures in therecipe manager we coded in Rust. Many coding challenges help you learn how to build data structures easily and test your knowledge of coding custom data structures.
One of the best things about coding challenges is that, no matter what your skill level, you can find a challenge that will test your knowledge and reinforce your learning. These challenges also come in a timed variety, giving you the experience of thinking on your feet to solve a problem. You have to determine which of these coding challenges best suits your skill level and knowledge.
What Benefits Are There to Coding Challenges?
Any level of programmer can complete coding challenges. However, what you choose to explore in a coding challenge differs depending on what you want to learn. Among the benefits that you get from exploring coding challenges include:
C++, Java, and Python are the most common languages for which coding challenges are offered, and some coding challenge sites specialize in a few of these languages. So, what does the inside of a coding challenge look like? Let’s find out!
Starting and Completing a Coding Challenge
Let’s look at a sample coding challenge.This one from HackerRankfocuses on the basics of Python coding. Right off the bat, you’re able to see that there’s a straightforward task listed in the left pane with an embedded compiler in the right pane.
All the way to the left, beyond the pane, are a series of tabs allowing you to check out the submissions for hints or the leaderboard to see who’s submitted for this challenge and succeeded.
Let’s look at this particular coding challenge. We need to figure out if n, the given integer, is odd. If it is, we print out “Weird.” That already gives us a line:
That seems fine, but what about the other conditions? Well, we can use an elif statement to check other conditions. The final code I came up with for this is:
In this case, I useelifthroughout the code block to create fall-through statements where the conditions are satisfied. This is a simple challenge focusing on using the if-then-else conditional statement in Python, but some get very involved. The medium-difficulty coding challenges include iterators and even something that helps with Regex commands.
A Few Tips For Doing Coding Challenges
Coding challenges can be fun, and you learn a lot from them, but if you’re a beginner, it may be overwhelming to just jump into a challenge. Here are a few things you should keep in mind when doing these challenges to ease yourself into them:
Where Can You Find Coding Challenges?
I already covered HackerRank in the previous challenge, and they’re the one I rely on for my own coding challenges. However, they’re far from the only site you’re able to use. Among the alternatives are:
Coding challenges are great ways to explore what you’ve learned in code using practical examples. If you’re new to coding and want to test yourself, give them a try. You may be surprised at how much you’ve learned since you started!
