Learning doesn’t need to be always serious. A great way to learn, have fun, and test your skills as a coder, is through some of the coding challenges.
Coding challenge websites are popular among coders since they offer a unique way of learning. Another opportunity these sites offer is to land a job from talent seekers, by ranking high in some sponsored challenges. Also, lots of those challenges have a winning price set, so you will learn, test your skills and make money.
Coding challenge websites will engage you to solve problems, by showing your skills in mathematics, testing, etc. Coding challenge will also challenge your knowledge in a different subject than merely coding. Entering the challenge, you will enter a coding community. These sites are a great place to communicate with people of the same interests as yours, a place to ask questions or use as a knowledge-sharing base.
It was “challenging” to pick only the five best coding challenge websites, and this is our list:
Coderbyte
Coderbyte is currently used by more than 1M developers, from beginners to senior coders, who like to test their skills. You can enroll in a free coding challenge or start with the Interview Kit, which this site offers as a training tool.
To improve your coding skills, Coderbyte offers these features:
– Algorithms, front-end, back-end, and database challenges
– Automated grading
– 3+ million solutions to learn from
By opening the Challenges site section, you will see all ongoing and new challenges. Another great thing is that you will have information on the challenge difficulty level (Easy, Medium, or Hard) and how many solutions are currently offered. It will guide you directly to the challenge you would like to enroll in.
LeetCode
LeetCode coding challenge website promotes “A New Way to Learn” and offers features like:
– Start Exploring
This tool will give you a structural guide to the next steps in your programming learning journey.
– Question, Community, and Contests
In the Problems dashboard (nicely organized, with a lot of data, a calendar you can use, etc.), select a problem to solve. The Contest section has all weekly contests listed with start date and hour. Once you Sign in, you will have a My Contests section, where all your contests will be listed.
Discuss board is useful for exchanging your questions with the community, or seeing what is new in interview questions, experience, etc.
HackerRank
HackerRank is a slightly different site from the two previous ones we presented. HackerRank is a coding challenge website that helps developers practice their coding skills, prepare for interviews, and get hired by desired companies.
Once you as a developer sign up, you can start coding and will join a community that welcomed almost 20 million developers.
Companies can select the Start Hiring solution, and request a Demo to see how the HackerRank Developer Skills Platform can help them to hire the best teams of developers.
Topcoder
An amazing fact about Topcoder is that this site is launched in 2001, so almost 22 years of coding challenges began as a game idea. It all started as a ranking system for developers, which is now a widely spread and known idea of crowdsourcing.
Choose the Topcoder community sector where you will connect with other developers, and learn more about coding. And what is also fun, by doing the coding challenges you can earn money and improve your ranking. Join Topcoder Open so you can qualify for in-person online competitions.
Codechef
Codechef is your classic coding challenge website. Excellent choice for beginners with its user-friendly dashboard. There are three main sections on the Codechef site: Practice, Compete, and Learn.
The Practice offers to practice on more than 3000 problems, and you will see they are divided by Difficulty rating and Popular topics. Coders can learn with video editorials, Debug your code feature and chat support.
The Compete is in the section where the next coding challenges are listed, with starting date and hour. There are 6+ contests per month, and four Divisions grouping will help you pair with programmers with similar skills as yours.
Users’ performances are listed in the Top Performers list with user names and their ranking.
Conclusion
Every person learns differently. And some people learn best by practicing in reality.
These platforms we presented are among the greatest ones for coding challenges.
Please try them all for yourself before accepting our opinion.
