Are 30 Days of Code Challenges Still Relevant?
The pros and cons of HackerRank’s 30 Day of Code challenge.
For the past few months, I saw many people share their progress on the 30 Days of Code Challenge by HackerRank. It intrigued me, and I wanted to try this challenge out myself. The 30 days of any challenge has to be a good practice, right?
What is this process?
As the name suggests, it is pretty straightforward. Every day you unlock a new coding challenge. You will receive a prompt similar to any competitive coding challenge. To remind you to complete your daily challenge, HackerRank even sends mail every day.
The challenges progress from writing a simple Hello World program on Day 1 to complex data structures such as solving a binary search tree, linked list, sorting, tree traversal. There are 30 questions, unlocked at an interval of 24 hours.
Should you take up this challenge?
If you are a beginner or you want to improve your simple coding concepts, this challenge is perfect for you. If you constantly slack and not code regularly, this could be a good place to start. The portal offers options to code in several languages and video tutorials in Java related to every topic.
However, this certainly is not enough to learn to code or data structures. Also, if you are not a novice, then this process can get boring fast. Solving simple problems such as looping, conditional statements, and arrays can feel dumb if you know how to do it.
There is a steep decline in the number of users as the days progress. At the time of writing this blog, the first question was completed by 1297357 users, while 255463 and 87679 people completed the Day 10 and 24 tasks, respectively. That means by Day 24, only 6.7% of original users stuck around to complete the tasks.
I’ll let you decide the rest for yourself whether this is worth your time or not.
In conclusion, I will say that it is a good place to start practice for writing basic code. You will also get an idea of how coding questions are worded and the way you need to submit your responses. However, if you are going into this after a year or two of practice, it might not be as useful. For practising data structures, you can refer to the “30 days of coding” website or this free course by Geeks for Geeks. An extended version of this challenge is the #100DaysOfCode initiative, in which you can take part and learn many new skills.
