Resources to help with white-boarding

Juan Castillo
Sep 4, 2018 · 5 min read

So here we go again and this time we’re going to discuss a topic that honestly got me into coding in the first place, Coding Challenges or white-boarding or problem solving, whatever you’d like to call it. The process in which you are giving a problem and you have to figure out the proper algorithm to solve it. Seems simple enough, until you get to these real advance problems and you’re just stuck there like :

So I decided that i wanted to get better at solving these kind of problems and the only way to do that was to actually practice it . So I decided to use my best friend GOOGLE and find out some websites that would show me some problems. Oh man did google not let me down. I’ve found some pretty cool websites where not only do you get to solve different problems but they are separated by difficulty, language, and can even compete against other people.

Project Euler

When I first started to learn how to deal with coding problems , I immediately took to reddit to ask what is the best way for a beginner to go about problem solving. A reddit user by the name of U/Eloiole pointed me in the direction of Project Euler and Daily Programmer to help develop my arithmetic. The way that Project Euler works is simple, you head to the website and hit the archives. There is where all the problems are being held. At first glance you can see what the problem is about and the number of people who have solved said problems. My only issue with Project Euler is that it really doesn’t state how difficult the problem is, just the amount of people who have solved said problem. I suppose you can try to decipher how hard a problem is by the number of people who have solved it, yet still a little difficult. Try it out for yourselves and let me know how you feel about it !

Daily Programmer

So unlike Project Euler, Daily Programmer separates challenges by difficulty. There is Easy, Intermediate, and Hard. If you keep scrolling down on the subreddit you’ll find many different challenges posted by different users . The only problem I personally find with this is the amount of opinions in the comments on how to solve this problem. THERE IS ALOT OF OPINIONS. If comments are your thing though, then you’ll find this subreddit very educational.

LeetCode

I was recently told about LeetCode by one of the instructors at Flatiron school Bootcamp and man has this been great. This website has everything you would ever need to prepare your self for a technical interview. It has problems that are dived up by difficulties. It has coding interview strategies and even different types of questions given by top companies ( the last part is a premium member thing though). Regardless it’s a pretty interesting website if you’re ever board and want to hone your problem solving skills, I suggest checking them out for a bit.

Daily Coding Problem

Daily Coding problem is just a simple website where you throw in your email address and they send you one interview question that was asked by companies like Google, Amazon, Uber, Microsoft, Apple , etc. I find this helpful because you’re not bombarded with many questions, you are just looking at one hard problem at a time and trying to solve it. Well if you can solve these questions that are asked by top companies I’m pretty sure you’re gonna nail any other interview ! This is absolutely FREE did I mention that? There is a premium membership where you can pay $9 a month and they will also send you the answers to said questions, but umm , I’m kinda broke so I’ll personally settle for checking my work and making sure my code works in all instances.

CSDOJO

CSDOJO is a Youtube Channel that’s actually really informative . A little bit of background,He is a self-taught programmer.He was employed by Google in Montreal for a while until he left to focus on his youtube career . The main purpose ( or what he likes to think his main purpose is ) is to teach people how to handle coding technical interviews. He takes questions that are asked by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and I think APPLE and breaks them down. Although he does this all in python he does tend to break down the his though process and explains his code line by line so that the user can understand as well. I tend to watch his videos a lot to better see how to approach problems. You guys should check him out sometime! He tried to build a reddit for Japan which i thought was pretty freaking cool!

SOME HONORABLE MENTIONS

These are websites that I’ve heard a lot about but haven’t had the time to actually try them out . I’m sure there is a lot that i’ve missed and I apologize for that since I’m still just a little noob in this coding game. If there are some better websites then please let me know I would love to learn more about them ! Welp, I think that’s all I have for now, it’s been a hectic week . Until next time yah’ll.

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