I stumbled upon a bit of awesome today. While I have been learning to code through sites such as Code Academy and Treehouse, I have had a real tough time finding ways to apply those skills that I learned without feeling completely overwhelmed. I stumbled upon Codewars, a site that trains coding through tackling real problems. I have taken online training classes and I took a programming class in college. The key difference between the two is that college forced me to apply everything I learned up to that point to write a program in response to the scenario provided. Code Academy and Treehouse are really good for laying down a good foundation and teaching the concepts really well, but they do a lot of hand holding when it comes down to laying down code.
When I want to take this knowledge and apply it to something, I feel really confused, overwhelmed and somewhat helpless. I really wanted to solidify my understanding by tackling some easier issues then jumping into developing games, WordPress plugins or exploit plugins.
Codewars starts out pretty basic and can challenge you up to very advanced topics. You cannot even sign up for an account without knowing something about programming so the basic beginner level is just right. I spent a bit of time working on some exercises today and felt pretty good when I was able to successfully solve the challenges. Once a challenge is completed all of the solutions for that challenge from the other users are opened up.
Evaluating solutions by other users is real eye opening experience. In this one problem, I someone solved it with a solution with in a single line of code, where I used five!
You can sign up using your GitHub account. I hope to see you out there, I’ll be plugging away at some problems myself.