Code Wars. My love and hate relationship.

What is code Wars? From their wiki they say “Codewars is a community of developers, who are called Code Warriors (or just warriors), that train on improving their development skills. Think of it like a coding dojo - where developers train with each other and help each other get better through practice.”

Yeah. Let’s go with that.

When I first started code Wars I was just starting my coding journey. I just finished my Flatiron School’s prep work and was looking for more coding things to do. Laurie from admissions pointed me to code Wars. I loved it.

There are exercises called kata’s that you can do with varying difficulty and in different languages. To me, it felt like solving puzzles with code. The higher you level up the harder the kata’s get.

Kata Page with instructions, a place to enter your code, and written tests.

At first, I felt smart after I solved my first kata. Seeing all those tests turn green. I hit submit and was presented with a screen with other users solutions.

Other user solutions

What was this code? Was this even Ruby? I no longer felt so smart.

I came back a few hours later and tried another kata. After solving it I was welcomed to another heart crushing one line of code that basically did the same thing my giant piece of code did. (Note: there is nothing wrong with writing out longer code if your logic is working)

Instead of stepping away this time, I started googling the other users submitted solutions. How did this work. Why did this work.

This looks familiar….

I started taking what I learned and applied it to the next kata. When ever I saw new code I would Google how it works and then try to apply it when I could.

I was no longer seeing it as this competition site, but as a learning experience.

Also, there are many different solutions for each kata. It’s amazing how there are many different ways people solved the same problem.

One liners are cool and all but my most important take away from code Wars is the practice in getting a problem, dissecting it logically, and then coding a solution.

I try to do at least one kata a day.

I’ll also be the first to admit when I can’t solve it I’ll check other user solutions (you lose credit for the kata) and then work my way backwards to how they solved it. I try to think through their logic which also helps me improve my logic.

TLDR;

Code Wars is a great learning tool for both logical thinking and coding proficiency. Keep learning. Pursue Mastery. Be Scrappy. This is the flatiron way.