What did I learn From My First Coding Challenge?

In this article, I would love to talk and discuss about my first coding challenge, what I learned from it, what I can do better to improve my score/rank, what can you do as a total beginner.

My First Coding Challenge

📝Things I am Going to Talk About

• What is a Coding Challenge?
• Dimensions of a Coding Challenge
• Competition I participated in
• My Rank and Scores
• My Experiences
• What You and I Should Do Improve Our Skills?
• Which Programming Language to Choose

👨‍💻What is a Coding Challenge?

So, a coding challenge/programming challenge is a 3–4 hour-long event where you have to solve algorithm and data-structure-based questions in a programming language.

📐Dimensions of a Coding Challenge

Dimensions of a Coding Challenge

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So, the Time Period of the coding challenge is dependent upon the number of questions which is dependent upon the quality of questions.

In my case,
Time Period: 3hrs
No. of Questions: 25 Questions
Quality of Questions: Ranging from “Hello World” to Hard-Level Questions

🤝The Competition I Participated In

So, the competition that I participated in was HPE Code Wars 2021 hosted by Codeingle that took place on the 10th of April.

🏆My Rank and Scores

My Rank: 156

Questions Solved: 17/25

Difficulty: 1–7🎈; 7–15😏; 15–17🤯;17–25😱

📈My Experiences

As expressed earlier, this was my first coding challenge. There are some of the things that I learned from it:-

• Coding Challenges are competitive but not as much as anticipated.
• It’s a lot of fun.
• Think about the language you choose. I will explain it more later in the article.
• The difficulty of the question will completely depend upon your merit and not the real difficulty.

🤹‍♂️What You and I Should Do Improve Our Skills?

1. If you think you have done the basics of any language then give challenges; you don’t have to wait to become a god in it.
2. Be consistent with your practice and concise with what you practice.
3. Try to be a part of more community discussions and more challenges.
4. Last but not the least, try to increase your ⌨typing speed.

Nobody is asking you to get a rank 1 in the first go and if you think you have to do that then you will waste a lot of time in getting there.

🖐Which Programming Language to Choose?

So, here I am gonna tell you the truth programming language matters in coding challenges. You need to keep these things in your mind:-

• Choose the language which has the least boilerplate code(the code you have to write to make the code work out of your real solution)

AtulACleaver/Hello_World-InVariousLanguages

• If you are new choose python move ahead. I felt that I would have done a lot better job if I had a much better knowledge of python instead of Java.
• But If you are not new to programming then you can c++ which is a faster language and more acceptable language.
• Look at some of your goals at first. For example, International Olympiad in Informatics only has an option of c++.

Just don’t forget to feel good about what you do and be happy about it. You have not lost time in your career by starting late and by taking any bad decisions and they all will pay back one day in the form of experience.