30 days of coding
HackerRank presents 30 days of coding to help new programmers work on coding fundamentals in bite-sized pieces. Every day for 30 days, you will receive an email posing a challenge for you to code, solve, and submit the solution.
For each challenge, you can see the code topic, the number of submissions, and the success rate. While you can still run your code and view community discussion about the question, some of these challenges rated “Easy” are actually pretty tough!
It all starts with Day 1. The first challenge simply introduces you to the question format and coding interface. It’s almost certain that there are people who attempted Day 1’s challenge without any intention of following through for all 30 days. But what about the people that moved on to Day 2 where you begin to test your knowledge of CS data structures?
Who stuck with it for 30 days?
Over the course of 30 (asynchronous) days, participation fluctuated based on the topic, as well as success rates. Of the people who I imagine had some intention of completing all the challenges by submitting a solution on Day 2, only 8.2% of them made it to the very last day.
Perhaps some people discovered other tools that they preferred, found jobs and no longer wanted to continue, or plainly lost interest. Whatever the reasons for dropping out, it turns out that true grit is one of the best predictors of success. So I encourage you to set a goal, it can be anything you choose, and work towards it for 30 days to strengthen your willpower and hopefully at the end of that time you will have accomplished something meaningful to you personally.
There are a number of other resources for new programmers who are just learning the fundamentals or for experienced ones who are brushing up for interviews. CodeFights is like HackerRank, and similarly is used by some companies as an initial technical screen before allowing you to progress to the interview-with-a-human stage. Interview Cake is a freemium service for practicing data structures and algorithms through self-study. Pramp is a free service for practicing technical interviews by pairing up engineers who interview one another online.
If you’re reading this article because you want to grow as a programmer, check out these resources and keep at it!
