10 Sites Where You Can Get Programming Practice

Watching and reading programming tutorials are great! They give a curated view of a concept or new technology that may take hours longer to understand than going at it alone. However, much like math, programming is not a spectator sport. You need to practice in order to better understand the programming concept or technology in a real program.

There are a lot of ways one can do this, though, without having to fully set up an environment for each language or framework you want to learn.

Here are 10 sites that you can use to start learning new languages and other programming concepts.

Code Wars

Code Wars profile view.

This is one of my favorite sites to go to, especially when I want some practice with a new language. They have most of the common languages already supported with a few more in beta so most likely you can get some practice in here.

All of the "katas", as they call the challenges, have always been challenging for me. Plus seeing other people's solutions I'm sure to learn something new.

Hacker Rank

Hacker Rank is another code challenge site, but a tad bit different. They also have competitions throughout the year where you can participate and see how you rank among other competitors. I've also seen some companies use this site as a first pass for interviewing candidates.

The nice thing about this site is that it pretty much emphasizes algorithms and data structures, which I consider two things that you could get the most out of if you practice it.

Top Coder

TopCoder compete login page.

TopCoder is similar to HackerRank, but you can actually get paid for the challenges you compete in. This is a good way to see how you compare with other developers in the challenges and to challenge yourself to get better at certain types of programming, such as data structures, math, and string manipulations.

Kaggle

Kaggle is more suited for data scientists, but it's a place where you can find data to play around with. They also host their own competitions that can pay out.

You don't need to use this for data science, though. Since they offer a lot of data sets you can use them in for other applications as well. Want to create a web app with some of the data? Go for it!

Project Euler

Project Euler is probably one of the first sites with programming challenges and puzzles. This site is composed of mathematical problems that you can solve in code and the further you go the harder the math problems.

Rosalind

Very similar to Project Euler, Rosalind gives challenges in regards to problems in bioinformatics. These challenges may be considsered a bit better since they solve more real world problems than just arbitrary math problems in Project Euler.

Screeps

This is a fun one, especially if you are really interested in game programming. This site gives you the opportunity to code exercises as part of a Real Time Strategy game with JavaScript. Game programming is a totally different beast than doing web sites or any other business applications as it's a different way of thinking and experience that goes with it. This is especially great to get started with some game programming when you don't necessarily have a project of your own to work on.

CodeChef

CodeChef is similar to TopCoder where they host several competitions and you can get paid for completing them. CodeChef holds those competitions monthly so you'll always have a chance to see how you stand against other programmers. There are definitely plenty of problems to practice before going into a competition and they are all ranked from easy to hard.

CodingGame

CodinGame is fairly similar to how Code Wars works, but the challenges are a bit more of a game. They are more turn based so with each "turn" you get new input and you must give new output based off of it. Similar to Screeps above, the challenges are like mini games you help code. When you run your test cases you can see your code in action as the game is being played, so you get some instant, and visual, feedback to how your code performs.

Up For Grabs

Ok, so this isn't much of an exercise site, but I feel that it's important enough to mention in this post. Why? Working on open source projects is one of the best things you can do as a developer, and this site helps make it easy. A lot of projects have been creating an "up-for-grabs" label on GitHub to let newer contributors get into their projects a lot easier by fixing easier bugs. Doing these will help you become a regular contributor to the project which will have more real world experience than doing other algorithmic or mathematical exercises.

My Deliberate Practice Plan to Become a Better Programmer

In the previous post, I reviewed the book So Good They Can't Ignore You. I wanted to take the ideas and advice from there and to create my own plan for deliberate practice as a software developer. Here's what I came up with...

Continuous learning

Being a software developer means to always be learning. Whether it's a new framework, new programming language, or a whole new programming paradigm learning something new is integral.

There are several ways to do this and I will try to incorporate all of them, though more will take more presidence and attentnion than others.

• Use sites like Pluralsight and Udemy for on-demand tutorials and training.
  • Watch at least one course each one or two weeks, depending on the length of the course.
• Watch at least one software presentation on YouTube or similar site.
  • Watch one at least each week. This should generate some "Top 10" posts for everyone to enjoy or, if it's really good enough, a post about a specific presentation.
• Read at least one technical book each quarter.
• Read and try to understand at least one journal paper on programming each quarter.
  • I plan on starting with this list. From there the Papers We Love site looks to have a ton more to go through.

Practicing

Of course, one of the biggest and best things to do as a developer is to actually program something...anything to help put into practice what I've learned. The above methods are great for learning new things, but they have to be put to use, as well, otherwise I won't be able to retain what I've learned.

• Have at least one personal project going at a time.
• Blog about things learned and always have a demo project for it, if possible.
• Get certified, if available.

Being uncomfortable

Doing deliberate practice often means being uncomfortable during the practice. This is an easy way to know if the practice is good or not. Here a couple of ways I can step outside of my comfort zone.

• Speak at a local user group at least once each quarter.
• Try to speak at a conference at least once this year.
• Do more screencasts instead of regular text posts for the blog.

Keeping track

Now, none of the above doesn't mean all that much if I don't keep track and accoutable for each of these. Saying I'm going to do it doesn't mean I am going to do it.

• Once again, blogging about each of the above items as much as possible
• Use a time tracker such as Plan to keep a digital record and for some nice reports.

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Since it's very close to the 2017 year, this is a great time to get started with this.

Do you have something you've done work very well for you but wasn't mentioned? What are your plans for having deliberate practice?

Exercism F# Track Now Available

Wait....F#?

Yep. After attending an interesting talk by James Dixon on data in F# I got a bit interested in the language. Of course, that's followed by reading articles, watching videos, and playing with it a bit on my own. The past month or so I've been messing around with it and plan on sticking to it for a while.

I can see F# going places in terms of functional programming and it's uses within .NET. Be prepared for more F# posts in the future, as well.

What is Exercism?

In short, Exercism is another site where people can learn a new programming language by doing different exercises. The difference with this one than the others, however, is that it's crowd-sourced. Meaning that, once you finish an exercise, you can send it off to be code reviewed by others.

It's definitely the best of both worlds where you practice the language and get peer reviews to help you learn that much quicker.

F# Track

And so, since I got interested  a bit more in F# and no one started messing with it in the Exercism F# repository, I figured I'd give it a shot. After a little while I was able to get it to meet the requirements to be launched!

Hopefully, I did decently in my own examples for the exercises (and if not, I'm not scared of some helpful tips), and that some people can get a bit of use out of it.

So feel free to give it a try and let me know or submit an issue if there are any problems!