My 100 Day Coding Challenge
Practice makes perfect
Some friends and I started a club recently with the goal of helping students understand the process of looking for a software engineering job. We’ve been meeting for over a month now studying interview questions together, talking about what it means to be a software engineer, and just getting to know each other and enjoying each other as fellow students. Last weekend, we had a picnic before our weekly class:
In the same weekend, my roommate sent me an article about doing a 100 day challenge:
This got my gears turning. I’ve been wanting to do a daily challenge / monthly accelerated learning / series kind of thing for a while now, but I couldn’t decide what to do. And with all the club work I’ve been involved with, I think I’ve found just the thing.
Over the next 100 days, I will code out and discuss my solutions to 100 computer science interview questions.
Why is this a great idea?
- I’ll get data structure / algorithms / programming practice every single day. I code at work, but doing these questions is different from my day to day.
- If I can increase my mastery of interview questions, I’ll better be able to coach others in understanding them as well.
- And finally, it’s a practice in picking something and committing to it. To show up day after day and not taking “no” for an answer.
However, I will also be keeping in mind that building software is about creating tools and optimizing processes. Writing code is just a means to an end. What problems am I trying to solve and why are they worth solving? Ultimately, whose day am I making better?
Over these next 100 days, I hope to at least make your day better by teaching you something new, or at least providing you entertainment in the form of schadenfreude.
You can follow my daily coding here: https://github.com/alberthu16/100-day-coding-challenge
I’ll also post weekly recaps on this Medium account, so follow me if you’re interested! Also, I encourage you to try a 100 day challenge for yourself!
* Thanks to Matt, Catherine, and Steven for proofreads :)
