All About Competitive Coding

Hello 👋 Beautiful People out there, Hope you find yourself well and healthy.

I'm bringing my new article which is focused on the A, B, C's of Competitive Coding and to bring the top 10 competitive coding platforms where you can learn, practice, master and compete with others based on your coding skills.

Note : This article is going to be long but you will enjoy reading every bit of it.

Many of you would have master some of the coding language and may be want to particularly check where you stand with the skills you have developed among the others who are deploying their skills in this small world. Because the level of competition is very high, since each one of us is better than other and becoming more and more better. Hence to make a count on yourself Competitive Coding provides the best outcome which will have you to access and know better of your coding skills. But before that let’s know what actually Competitive Coding Means.

What is Competitive Coding 👨‍💻

As Wikipedia says, competitive programming is a mind sport usually held over the Internet or a local network, involving participants trying to program according to provided specifications.

Basically, it is a type of contest where a number of programmers attempt to solve programming questions in a limited amount of time with under some preconditions set by the organizer. You can write your solution in any programming language that you’re comfortable with. Solutions should pass all of the test cases (given and hidden) in order to be accepted under certain time and space limits.

Time and Space Complexity plays a very major role in competitive coding. You might pass all the public and hidden test cases and your code would have satisfied all the given conditions, but if the written code is not efficient in the time and memory aspect then you can’t win any competitive coding contest. Best Code should take the least possible time and memory (i.e., space) to compile and run to provide the best outputs.

Big tech companies, like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc hire through competitive programming competitions. As an added bonus, various online competitions offer some amazing prizes for the winners.

Major Benefits of Competitive Coding 👨‍💻

1. Helps you to do a coding task in a stipulated time – Need to Complete a given task with in the given time range, hence it indirectly increases you thinking and working capabilities.
2. Cracking the Job Interviews – It definitely helps one to prepare for technical and coding interviews as the questions and the contests held make you more ready to crack any interview.
3. Strengthen your programming and software knowledge – As you practice more and more on certain portion it indirectly makes you master of that thing.
4. Helps you to land a job in Dream Companies – There are many examples of this where a lot of aspirants got their dream job after practicing, coding and competing in such platforms.
5. Increases your Problem-solving skills – As you solve an enormous number of problems it makes problem solving as your habit and you are able to think and come to the logic quite fast, that is why it increases your problem-solving skills.
6. Helps you better to work in a team – Since most of the coding contests take place as a group of some coders, hence it taught you how to work better with a team and lead to success.
7. Better self-assessment and correct the mistakes – All of the platforms provide you to keep track of your activities and the mistakes that you have done, hence it helps to assess yourself and not to repeat a mistake again.
8. Makes you faster and more focused – With continuous practice and time on these platforms you become faster and more focused to solve the particular problems.

Hence, what we can say that the benefits from Competitive coding is endless as it helps us to make better day by day, here only some of the main benefits have been listed which are mainly to motivates you and dive directly to the choice of your platform to prepare and compete with all the coders and programmers out there in this world.

Prerequisite for Competitive Coding 👨‍💻

There are some basic and important conditions that have to meet before you start for competitive coding, this is because if you start without these condition then at each point you will stuck with some or the other problem and at last, finally you will give up with the competitive coding. So, the prerequisite are –

• Pick a suitable language to code, in my opinion C++ is best for competitive coding.
• Choose a powerful code editor to run and compile your code, VS Code is best suitable to use in my opinion.
• Select a few platforms to practice, some of the best platforms are listed below.
• Make clear with the Data-Structures and Algorithms, good hands on these are very much required in competitive coding.
• Solve different kinds of problems to build a great confidence on your coding skills.
• Most important is to have continuous involvement in practicing.

Note : Remember one cannot master a skill in a night, it takes continuous passion and determination to master such things.

Now let’s list down the competitive coding platforms where you can show case your skills and knowledge among all others.

Note : Most of the below listed competitive platforms are not suitable for beginners. But you can at least try to explore these and gain some basic knowledge.

List of Top 10 Competitive Coding Platforms 👨‍💻

1. HackerRank

HackerRank provides you with topic wise as well as language-based proficiency to master with their learning and practicing curve. They have a long-listed problems to try from easy to the hardest level and if you are able to solve the coding problems that are on HackerRank then you are among those who can compete in the Competitive Coding with full of Confidence.

There are always some or the other coding competitions held on this platform, also various organization uses HackerRank to find suitable candidate for their company through these competitions. I would suggest that one should have a complete knowledge about this platform.

Link to visit - https://www.hackerrank.com/

2. CodinGame

CodinGame is a technology company editing an online platform for developers, allowing them to play with programming with increasingly difficult puzzles, to learn to code better with an online programming application supporting twenty-five programming languages, and to compete in multiplayer programming contests involving timed artificial intelligence, or code golf challenges.

CodinGame also serves as a recruiting platform, allowing developers to get noticed by companies based on their performance on the contests, as there is coding contest which occurs continuously on this platform. You are going to love this platform.

Link to visit - https://www.codingame.com/

3. Project Euler

Project Euler is a website dedicated to a series of computational problems intended to be solved with computer programs. The project attracts adults and students interested in mathematics and computer programming. Since its creation in 2001 by Colin Hughes, Project Euler has gained notability and popularity worldwide.

Project Euler helps you to keep track of the progress that you have completed on this portal. Since the levels of programming problem is quite high and solving these problems are not an easy task, therefore if you are able to solve those problems than you are on a good track to build the Competitive skills, and can easily perform on any programming competition using the skills gained through this awesome platform.

Link to visit - https://projecteuler.net/

4. LeetCode

It's a website where people–mostly software engineers–practice their coding skills. There is 800+ questions (and growing), each with multiple solutions. Questions are ranked by level of difficulty: easy, medium, and hard. This platform is not for the beginners as the level of difficulty for problems is high.

You can practice these problems to crack any coding interview as the main focused of problems on this platform is to prepare well for the interviews. Also, it creates several contests based on the coding where you can participate and earn a reward. Hence indirectly helps you to compete among several others from all over the world.

Link to visit - https://leetcode.com/

5. Exercism

Exercism aims to provide opportunity for people of all backgrounds by helping them develop their programming skills through practice and mentorship. We provide thousands of exercises spread across over 50 language tracks.

One can practice the programming problems that are available on this platform. Their main area of interest is to provide only the programming skills to the learners as of now and gaining popularity day by day.

Link to visit - https://exercism.io/

6. SPOJ

The SPOJ platform is centred around an online judge system, which serves for the automatic assessment of user-submitted programs. It also has a long list of programming problems to solve where you can keep track of your progress and the ranking among all the users on this platform.

SPOJ also creates several contests and hackathon time to time where you can show case your programming skills. It also provides you with the option to set the programming problems and also to set the coding contests and hackathons.

Link to visit - https://www.spoj.com/

7. CoderByte

CoderByte is a web application built to help you practice programming and improve your coding skills. They offer a collection of code challenges and web development courses that can help you prepare for upcoming job interviews. The coding challenges range in difficulty and they can all be completed straight in our online editor.

CoderByte offers more than 200 various types of coding challenges which you can solve in an online editor using 10 different programming languages. It provides official solutions and more than 800,000 user created solutions. It also provides you with some of the starter courses and the interview preparation kit to try out. CoderByte is also act as a Recruiting platform where some of the best technical talent is hired.

Link to visit - https://coderbyte.com/

8. CodeWars

CodeWars is an educational community for computer programming. On the platform, Software developers train on programming challenges known as kata. These discrete programming exercises train a range of skills in a variety of programming languages, and are completed within an online IDE.

There are several Coding challenges that take place on CodeWars and one can participate in these challenges under the conditions set to qualify. You can Improve your skills by training with others on real code challenges. They have a built-in platform called as Kata where you can practice certain challenges and can check-up your progress and ranks among all others on the Kata.

Link to visit - https://www.codewars.com/

9. Top Coder

Top coder is a crowdsourcing company with an open global community of designers, developers, data scientists, and competitive programmers. Top coder pays community members for their work on the projects and sells community services to corporate, mid-size, and small-business clients.

You can check their various articles and videos on the competitive programming topics. They have a long list of programming question to try and master the programming topics. They have a lot of resources which you can read, practice, and try out by yourself to gain a better understanding of the things.

Link to visit - https://www.topcoder.com/

10. CodeChef

CodeChef offers thousands of the competitive programming challenges. Basically, it is an Indian Software company which has the community of developers across the globe. It allows you to write code in their online editor and view a collection of challenges. The coding problems are separated into different categories based on your skill level.

CodeChef is a go-on platforms for many programmers and developers as there are always some or the other coding competition takes place. You can also practice some of the coding problems that they have on their platform. It also provides you with some of the tutorials which you can take to make yourself comfortable with the topics and the coding and competing environment on CodeChef.

Link to Visit - https://www.codechef.com/

Hope this article helps the community of learners and beginners to select the best competitive platform and master their programming skills, as each platform is better than other as they provide the best content and results those ones need to master. These platforms are also a great resource to practice well for your programming interviews. The quality and depth of the problems on these platforms are unmatchable.

Thank you for Reading, would Love ❤ to hear your valuable feedback.

If anything is confusing or incorrect then let me know in the comment section. Thanks, from my side, this is Mayank, keep learning and exploring!!

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