Throughout my journey learning front end web development I have been through a lot of different coding challenge websites.
A few months ago, I was introduced to CodeSignal, and have been using it ever since.
First Impressions
I recently took an hour coding test on CodeSignal. After enjoying the experience, I signed up. I found the UI to be really fun and engaging. I’ve tried using other code challenge websites in the past, and always found them unnecessarily confusing, and lacking character. Meanwhile, I found CodeSignal to be full of color, with an easy layout to understand.
The basic version has two options.. Arcade or Interview Practice.
Interview Practice
- I find this feature to be really useful, and I appreciate the organization of the topics at hand. For example, the first topic is Data Structures, and it covers Arrays, Linked Lists, Hash Tables, Trees, Heaps, Stacks and Queues.
Plus! The challenges tell you which companies have asked them in the past.
The Arcade
What a fun name for a place to drill no-context coding challenges day in and day out. The UI is an exciting place to be as well, making you feel like you are digging your well of knowledge deeper and deeper by taking advantage of the “endless scroll” that so many other websites take advantage of… but this time for good instead of evil!
My Approach
I use CodeSignal to practice for technical interviews.
I do one challenge per day, that consists of two 15 minute sessions.
In the first 15 minutes, I attempt to solve the challenge by myself, with no help from the internet. I make sure to document my thought process using comments.
In the second 15 minutes, I compare my answer and thought process to other correct answers. This is a feature I like about CodeSignal, once you solve the question, you unlock all of the other correct answers. It isn’t this easy on other code challenge websites. In some cases you have to spend coins to unlock the solutions.
Once the initial 15 minutes is up, if I haven’t solved the challenge… I google the answer. Although, instead of simply copy/pasting the answer and moving on, I compare the thought process of the answer I found to mine.
Overall, I think CodeSignal is the most useful code challenge website. I find it’s user experience to be really ergonomic and I plan on continuing to use it on a daily basis to improve my coding.
Top comments (2)
Thanks for this article. I had not heard of CodeSignal, but it seems like a great way to test and expand my developer skills.
For those looking for a link, I found it here: codesignal.com/developers/
Hey, nice article, I'm a huge fan of codesignal as well! I'm solving a code problem every day and I'd love to create a kind of group, so we can support each other! Cheers