Today, there are more variations of technical roles than ever before, and constantly ongoing proliferation of new languages, frameworks, and technologies is a major must. Technical employees or aspiring newbies that want to get ahead should routinely test and refine their skills. So as to grow we need challenges and tasks that make our brains think outside the box. Thus, we’ve put together the following list of coding challenge platforms where you can level up your skills from data science to developer operations.

#1 HackerRank

Link: https://www.hackerrank.com/

HackerRank is a leading platform for competitive programming challenges where you have to solve the problems by the given specifications in any of the various programming languages such as Java, Python, NodeJS,Redis,MongoDB and etc. This website is perfect for beginners as there are tutorials and explanations. Apart from this, participants solve the problems in various computer science domains like algorithms, machine learning, and AI. You can also earn badges by solving challenges and they will be added to your profile after success. The type of contests are:

• 101-Hack – A monthly algorithmic contest in which 5 challenges have to be solved within 2 hours.
• HourRank – (The shortest contest) 3-4 algorithm challenges solved within 1 hour.
• Week of Code – A weeklong algorithm contest where there is a new challenge every day.
• Ad Infinitum – A 48-hour contest of Mathematics conducted every three months.
• Real Data/Machine Learning Contests – A weeklong contest that focuses on real-world data skills
• Language/Domain Specific Contests –Contests based on various programming languages
• شرکت پایاپارس Contests – The contests are sponsored by specific companies that are looking to hire developers.
• World CodeSprint – 24-hour contest with 7 challenges.

#2 CodeChef

Link: https://www.codechef.com/

CodeChef is a competitive programming website that offers several challenges for aspiring programmers to practice and sharpen their programming skills through various online contests. CodeChef conducts a programming competition at the start of every month and also conducts 2 smaller programming contests at the middle and end of the month. You can submit your solution in any of the programming languages as the contests accept solutions in over 55+ programming languages! Apart from these, CodeChef also offers forum discussions to make the journey of computer programming more feasible. Some of the major stats regarding CodeChef contests are as follows:

• CodeChef has around 1,250,000+ programmers from 12,000 institutions.
• There are approximately 3200+ programming contests with around 92 million+ submissions.

#3 TopCoder

Link: https://codeforces.com/

TopCoder is one of the most popular platforms for online programming competitions. Anyone can join the Community to participate and compete in challenges. The TopCoder Community has majorly 4 segments – Design, Development, Data Science, and Competitive Programming. There are various data science challenges as Marathon Match, Data Science First to Finish, Data Science Sprint & Ideation, and Data Visualization. The Competitive Programming domain of the Topcoder community revolves around Single Round Matches (SRMs) offered on weekly basis at a specific time in which all participants compete against each other to solve the problems as fast as possible. Some TopCoder facts:

• There are 5 times more engineers than Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter combined!
• Around 1,400+ Crowdsourcing challenges are completed per quarter.
• The Community has around 1.5M members in over 190 countries.
• 1,800 new members join per week.

#4 Codeforces

Codeforces is a Russian website that hosts competitive programming competitions where coders across the world compete with each other. Those who pass that set of solution tests receive the opportunity to go through the sources of other contestants, search for mistakes there and suggest the tests on which these solutions do not work. Accordingly, you can hack or challenge others’ solutions and can earn points through it. Then after the contest, all the solutions that pass the pretests and have not been hacked or challenged are tested on the final set of tests. Every month they organize nearly 6 contests. Also, participation in the contests is free and open to everybody. Codeforces offers various type of coding challenges and features such as:

• Short format Contests with a duration of 2 hours.
• Educational Contests of 2.5 hours duration conducted up to 3 times a month.
• You can challenge or hack other contestants’ solutions as well.
• You can also solve problems from previous contests for learning objectives.

All in all, challenges are nerve-racking and extremely satisfactory at the same time. If you are up to a new activity or you want to stay in line with the most recent trends these challenging communities are worth it!