As you continue to grow as a developer and your technical expertise increases, a need for you to engage in code challenges becomes necessary. Engaging in code challenges helps you become great at problem-solving, makes you hirable, and positively impacts your overall thinking process.
In this article, I will be highlighting some of the reasons you should engage in more code challenges.
It helps build your muscle memory:
Do you remember the first time you started learning a programming language? Remember how you constantly checked the documentation and guide while browsing through all the cheat sheets and tutorials online? Now evaluate yourself – are you still doing these? You have probably developed muscle memory and can now declare variables, write complex nested functions and methods without checking any docs. That’s how muscle memory works, and the same thing goes for code challenges. The more you engage in it, the better you become. The problems you solve help you approach related coding problems when you see one.
Continuous evaluation of your problem-solving Approaches:
An essential skill to have as a developer is problem-solving – approaching and solving problems on a case-by-case basis. One way to improve this engaging in code challenges. Solving code challenges will introduce and open your mind to different ways of solving problems in general. It will also refine how you write codes to ensure you are following the best coding practices. These code challenges help with your logic reasoning as some challenges are primarily to check how logically you can approach and answer a question beyond writing the code.
It helps prepare you for Job Interviews: One of the evaluation processes organizations use during recruitment is code challenge. So if you’re applying for jobs, it’s essential to prepare yourself well for the code challenge and research past code challenges of different organizations.
Where can I find code challenges? Below is a list of some popular platforms where you can engage and solve code challenges.
- HackerRank
- LeetCode
- Codewars
- TopCoder
- CodinGame
- CodeFights
- CodeEval
- Advent of Code
- SPOJ
- Exercism.io
- CodeChef
Take away: Code challenges can be addicting when you start. Ensure not to equate solving code challenges with building real-world projects as both have their places, so you must balance the two appropriately.
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