Recently, I’ve been spending most of my coding time on HackerRank. As I mentioned before, I was lead onto this site by a coding challenge I had to complete for a potential employer.
So what is HackerRank?
HackerRank is a place that offers practice content in a variety of languages, allow you to gain certification for free (though these have little professional value), compete in coding contests, and they even host an online career fair.
Now, 100% of my time using HackerRank thus far has been on the practice content and the interview prep. The certifications are interesting to me simply for milestones and goals to shoot for. The contest’s might be cool once I have accrued more confidence in my coding abilities, but honestly, I’m not a competitive person anyway. At this stage of the game, the career fair is extremely appealing for me, but it’s in the fall so it’s pretty far off.
The format and layout of the site is clean and intuitive so I find it easy to navigate and appealing to look at.
It took me a bit to get acquainted with the way the tests and questions are phrased and I found myself rereading them once or twice. That’s primarily me making sure the understand the objective though. It’s felt great to be able to become familar with it at my own pace without the pressure of having another person (in person or on video) “breathing down my neck”. I definitely have stage fright and anxiety when I know attention is on me and to be able to practice common interview questions and problems away from prying eyes has made me feel significantly more comfortable.
I also have been focusing on Java, Javascript, and Ruby and something I’ve found pretty nice to do is complete each problem in each of those languages. It does lose a little of the magic once you have solved a problem, but I find it extremely helpful to see how the problem is solved in each languages syntax. This also helps to alleviate a bit of my rustyness. I typically put the languages on a rotation solving a problem in one, completing it in the others, then solving the next problem using the next language in the rotation. That definitely keeps me fresh.
All in all I’ve found HackerRank to be a good confidence builder and it has been a great tool to expose me to different situations and questions I didn’t get exposed to during the Flatiron program.
Go check it out! It’s free and you can almost certainly find content that will be beneficial to your programming journey!