HackerRank: My Experience and Opinion

My career search has been on hold while I finish some much needed medical treatments. A concern during this time of working in a call center is keeping my programming skills current. I have my sandbox to do some programming in, but, admittedly, I haven't set aside large enough blocks of time to do any significant work. A few months ago, I was introduced to HackerRank and have played on it some.

HackerRank is a site with a variety of programming challenges. They also have tutorial series and coding contests. I gave it my first go when they offered a tutorial series on JavaScript. I claim that in the realm of web development, JavaScript is my weak spot. Based on this tutorial, I'm much better at JavaScript than I give myself credit for. Of course, the tutorial was aimed at people with little experience with the language. Some of the questions asked in the discussion area consisted of very basic, fundamental issues.

Another aspect of the JavaScript tutorial that disappointed me was it was geared towards optimizing algorithms. To me, JavaScript is largely relegated to web pages where the focus is on DOM accessing and manipulation, animation (tabs, drop-down menus, sliders and galleries). There are other uses for JavaScript beyond the 'average' web page; implementations of NodeJS, AngularJS and others are examples. However, being good as optimizing algorithms still isn't of a lot of use, in my opinion. The HackerRank tutorial, while starting off as a good lesson for beginners, strayed from what I'd consider useful in the real world.

Unfortunately, much of the other areas of the site has similar issues. Various programming tasks were oriented towards beginner tutorials or algorithm optimization. While the concept of Big O is important in developing any code, Hacker Rank’s focus on speed and optimization lacks true real world application. At least, that's my opinion.

It's a disappointing opinion to have. To me, being a hacker of beautiful code requires real world abilities to develop complete applications, skills to tackle tasks from multiple angles, and knowledge of more complex strategies. I suppose I should simply focus on my pet projects. To do that, I need to do a better job of making time to do that work.