The computer has become a powerful yet cost effective means to take over many fields of works that are rather mechanical or formula based. In fact, computers can deliver better performances in these areas compared to human employees. There is an extra investment for the maintenance but even including that, the total cost is much cheaper considering the quality output.

The future inevitably belongs to the machines and to the people who can program/engineer them to act to our needs. Hence, computer programming is a crucial skill for this generation and the next.

You will know about programming from a lot of sources but just knowing isn’t good enough. It is like maths. You have to practice and find out new imaginative ways of tackling problems.

For this purpose, there are a lot of coding challenges that you can take to help train your brain and become a better programmer.

There are a lot of coding challenges that you can find online. Here we have shortlisted some of the better ones so you can save time by ignoring the searching and going straight into solving.

So without further hindrance, here are the best 15 Coding Challenges to Improve Your Programming Skills:

15 Coding Challenges to Improve Your Programming Skills

Project Euler

Project Euler is one of the oldest coding challenges available on the internet. It was created over a decade ago and has a community of over hundreds of thousands of users.

You will get a handsome list of over four hundred and fifty coding problems, after solving which you can entertain yourself with an extra challenge added every week.

The problems are not hard but rather invokes a mind for critical thinking.

[topcoder]

[topcoder] is another popular platform to test your programming and thinking capabilities. It is an amalgamation of some of the best coders in a large community with the opportunity to earn money.

It is not a place where amateurs will have an easy time. But if you want to learn and have a burning enthusiasm then [topcoder] provides great challenges to enhance your brain’s processor. Plus, all this will add to your resume.

CodeEval

Much like [topcoder], CodeEval is another great way to learn and earn. You have to be a developer to join CodeEval where you can participate in competitions for building apps and win prize money.

It hosts a great means for developers to showcase their experiences to other developers or employers all the while improving themselves.

HackerEarth

The main focus of HackerEarth is to serve as a developer gathering and selection platform. A SaaS application is built into the system which automatically assess the logical and analytical skills of their challengers.

Many challenges are added every week for you to analyze your own analytical thinking. And even if you don’t get any job offering, you will also grow into a better coder and find self-evaluation, and you can monitor your self-improvement over time.

There are also some more extra features thrown in, that any experienced developer will enjoy.

SPOJ(Sphere Online Judge)

If you have time on your hands and want it to be properly invested, then head on over to SPOJ. It will keep you busy for hours (even weeks) with its mind-bending coding challenges.

SPOJ also boasts a community of over three hundred thousand active users who constantly pitch-in to community forms.

You can also add your own challenges and organize programming tournaments.

It is equally usable for people who are new to the game, to veterans and the experienced folk. Also, SPOJ can be used as a training platform if you like. It also provides you with feedback on your solution to let you know how good your answers are.

Codility

Codility is a great place for newcomers to programming, who don’t want to get their morals down by the present competition. There is a multitude of problems available to choose from; each sorted according to difficulty and comes with a detailed explanation of their respective solutions.

Think of Codility like a place where you give exams and get answer books to see how you fared. Plus there is also a time limit labeled on each, so your slack mode doesn’t take effect.

Coderbyte

Coderbyte is a great self-evaluation platform for beginners to intermediate level programmers. It consists of a decently large and active community of developers who enjoy being productive in their spare time and solve coding problems.

You can also use Coderbyte to ask questions regarding some topics (of course related to coding) that you don’t understand and will get an elaborate, well-explained answers by professionals in the field.

Daily Programmer

Wouldn’t it be great if Reddit and some code challenging platform just somehow merged into an incredible entity? I mean we all spend some time to see our Reddit feeds. It would be great if our coding needs were also met in the same place. Well, someone has already thought of this, and since then there is Reddit’s own Daily Programmer.

It is filled with many problems right now, and you can sink in them to test your brain. And if you are done with them, then three new ones are added each week.

Plus we all know that Reddit can have a massive community. You can rest assured that every one of your submissions will get evaluated by community members, and then you will get their opinion and answers on approaching the problem under consideration.

CodeChef

CodeChef is a great way for you to engage with the developer community, practice with many coding challenges and compete with other developers to ultimately find out the best you can be.

It consists of a diverse array of a boatload of coding problems for you to test your mind. Everything is also categorized in accordance to difficulty so beginners can start out here and rank their way up to the top.

You also have access to the source codes for problems that have been solved by the rest of the community.

HackerRank

HackerRank is another popular site visited by many developers. One of its key point of attraction are problems regarding artificial intelligence.

A.I is a promising field that is both interesting and hold much job opportunity for the future.

Many advanced programmers like to involve their minds with A.I coding just to get them ready for when A.I becomes something of a daily basis.

Codeforces

Many of you might already be decent programmers but stuck in a mundane job with monotonous work that is dulling your mind. Codeforces is a great way to keep your brain analytical and critical thinking ability up to the mark.

Here you get daily or weekly challenges that are short and adequate to quench your thirst for thinking.

Plus you can make groups, go to the code gym, see who the top coders are and participate in frequent competitions for the coding cup.

CodinGame

All of us programmers know how exciting and satisfying coding can really be, right? Right guys?

Anyhow, if anyone of you feel coding is not entertaining enough on its own(how could you?), then how about playing a game along with it.

Well, yes all men and women aren’t wired in the brain the same way; and some might hold some great new algorithm that wasn’t shared with the world because that person thought a string of characters and forward slashes are annoying.

For them, CodinGame is a great way to learn, improve their coding skills and find their dream jobs, while playing.

FightCode

FightCode is like the film Real Steel. Here you get to program your own virtual robot just like many other participants. Then have these robots battle one another in sheer coding mayhem. Just kidding, there is no mayhem, only fights.

But it is a great code and play platform and useful for newcomers to this approach.

Exercism

Exercism is more of a community/ forum based way to tackle the problem of finding the best coding challenges.

Exercism sets up a platform that gets together multiple developers and amateur programmers alike where people help each other and ask questions, provide answers and overall create a positive, helpful, online community for developers.

Kaggle

This one is more tuned towards the professionals who boasts about their coding skills and are very competitive about it. Kaggle offers a platform for paid competition. If you are truly talented at coding and want to challenge other coders for money than Kaggle is a great platform.

You can earn a lot of money through Kaggle if you have the skills. Plus there are a lot of programming tutorials available that can be handy for novices to learn and professionals to stay fresh with.

Conclusion:

Coding challenges are some of the best ways to improve your mental attitude towards programming. It helps you learn new ways of solving a problem. Teaches you new languages(Programming languages). You find out how to tackle some of the more challenging or critical problems. And if you are truly passionate about computers and programming then it can be a whole lot of fun.

This is a listing of some of the more popular and better coding challenges available in the market. If you happen to know of something better, then do enlighten the crowd in the comments. We will be glad to know.