DEV Community: Coding-Hashira

Tips To Improve Your Logic Building Skills

Coding-Hashira — Sun, 20 Feb 2022 06:12:46 +0000

Logic building is a very important part of programming. Whether it’s a basic logic of a basic game, or advanced logic of complex algorithms. Your logic building skills determine whether you’re a good developer or a great one. That’s why you must improve your logic building skills.

That’s the reason I’m writing this blog. In this blog, I’ll share some personal tips and tricks to improve your logic building skills. So, let’s begin!

Conceptual Clarity is a Must

If you want to improve your logic building skills, conceptual clarity is a prerequisite. If your basic concepts aren’t clear, how can you even try to improve your logic? And by conceptual clarity, I don’t mean to just read/watch basic concepts and then jump to advance questions. You must code yourself. That’ll only help you. Write basic programs, solve basic questions related to that specific topic.

See, you can’t skip to step 2 if you’ve not completed step 1 properly. Just like that, you can’t skip to advance concepts without having a good understanding of basic ones. If you do, there’ll be a time when every concept will go above your head and that’ll be very frustrating.

Consistency is the Key To Success

If you want to be a successful programmer, you have to be consistent. You can’t just say, “I practiced a lot yesterday, I deserve a rest today.” You must practice every day. And by practice, I don’t mean by just 15–30 minutes a day. It’s advisable to practice at least 1 hour a day. Now, I can understand that it’s hard to give 1 hour every day, if you’re doing a job, or even if you’re in college, but you have to manage.

Consistent coding doesn’t always mean practice. You can make projects or learn new topics. The main thing is to write code. Don’t just read books or watch tutorials. Nothing can help you unless you spend time in coding yourself.

Here I want to mention what helped me to keep consistent. There’s a community on Discord (For people who don’t know discord, it’s just an enhanced version of WhatsApp), Scaler. They started a program called 365 days of code. Under this program, you’ve to code daily and share your progress with them for continuously 365 days. The best part about it is, it gives you several rewards whenever you reached a milestone like 25 days, 50 days, etc.

You can join Scaler here.

‘Perfect’ Practice Makes a Man Perfect

Many people complain they practice, despite that, they can’t improve their logic building skills. The major problems with their practice are they practice very little time, as mentioned earlier, or they just search for ‘Practice Problems For Beginners Python (or any other language)’. You might ask, what’s wrong with this approach? See, there’s nothing wrong with this way, but this is not an efficient way to practice.
Instead, choose a particular website with questions, and solve them regularly. There are many advantages to this, like top quality problems, progress tracking, questions on every topic and many more. And, not to mention, there are plenty of websites you can try for practice questions. Let me provide you with a list of the top ones:

CodeWars
Leetcode
HackerRank
HackerEarth
GeeksForGeeks
CodeChef

Even in practising on these websites, don’t forget the first rule, consistency. You can’t say that now I’m not able to solve questions from this website, I should switch to a newer one. See, you’ve got to increase your level gradually, you can’t always search for basic problems.
One more common mistake people do is that they stick to one problem and spend 2–4 days on that one problem. And sometimes, even after 2–4 days of hard work, they don’t get the solution, and they give up. You can’t do that. Set a specific time for a problem. If you can’t do it, see the solution. Seeing solution isn’t a crime.

There must be consistency in the number of questions as well. Don’t set unrealistic goals. Believe me, you might even complete unreal targets (such as 15–20 questions a day), but you’ll not be able to follow your target consistently. This doesn’t even mean setting smaller goals every time. What I’m trying to say is, first set smaller goals, such as 2 problems a day and when you’ll do it continuously for 1–2 weeks, you can gradually raise your goal and level.

Join Coding Communities and Help Others

When you help other people, it gives you confidence and improves your own programming skills. Never think that if you’re a beginner, you can’t help anyone. Keep in mind that there are many people who are newer to coding, and you can help them. Now the question is, how can I find people who want help? Well, you’ve two options, either you can join some communities online and help them, or you can find people who want help at websites like Quora and Stack Overflow.

If you think that you’re still not capable of helping others, then join them. I mean to say solve problem with your friends (online or offline) or make projects with them. This way, you can see how others work, which is also beneficial for you.

One community I’m mentioning again is Scaler. This community helps me in a lot of ways. You can get help and give help here. And don’t think that there are few people here. This community is very large. In fact, they’re just 2,000 members far from the 100k milestone!

Never Lose Hope

After only a few failures, many people withdraw their dedication to improve logic building. See, the first thing you’ve to remember is, Logic Building isn’t any kind of additional skill. It’s a must have skill for programming. You can’t just give up if you want to be a developer. Giving up is never an option.

Don’t make the problems you face a demotivating factor, instead, make it a motivating factor. Whenever you face a problem, try to push harder until you get a solution.
Every successful programmer you see today wasn’t born good at logic building. Consistency and practice are the only way you can improve your logic building skills.

Many times you’ll face problems which are complex and hard to solve, and that’s obvious, but don’t let those problems scare you. Face your problems.

Some Additional Tips

I’ve covered the main and the most effective ways to improve your logic building skills. Now, I’ll not deep dive into these tips, because this will only make this article boring and lengthy. So, let me tell you some additional tips in less time.

Learn Different Paradigms: Paradigms such as Object Oriented Programming (OOP) and Functional Programming (FP) help you improve your general programming skills and logic building skills.
Learn New Skills: Learning new skills such as new frameworks, libraries and modules is always helpful for a developer.
Build Projects Time to Time: Building a project challenges your ability. It’s a kind of exam after all the problems and questions you have solved. I would recommend you to build at least 1 mini project a week and 1 mega project a month.
Join Coding Contests To Test Yourself: Take part in more hackathons and coding contests as possible.

Conclusion

That’s all for this blog. Hope you find it useful. If yes, leave a comment. If you want to share your own advice, comment that down!

For articles like this, please inspire me just by following me and commenting on this article.

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Thanks For Reading! Happy Coding

Unique Project Ideas to Improve Your React Skills

Coding-Hashira — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 09:45:55 +0000

What does a programmer want after learning a new language/framework? Practice and projects, right? So, I’m going to tell you some unique projects you can make to practice and improve your React Skills.
At the end of each project, I have added a section where I’ll tell you how can challenge yourself even more in that project, how you can improve that project, etc. And, I promise you that after the completion of each project, you’ll learn something new and become better. I’ll try my best to keep only the best and unique project ideas on this list. Now, let’s begin!

Movie Recommendation App

You might also face this question: What should I watch next? If yes, you’re not alone, many people want recommendations about what to watch next. This project can help them, as well as you, to improve your skills. Now, the first question that comes to you is what to use to make this project. The answer is simple! If you’re an intermediate, use machine learning. For beginners, an API will do the work. There are several APIs you can use in this project, including the most famous movie database API, IMDb. But if you ask me, I would suggest TMDb. It’s an alternative, in fact, a suitable alternative to IMDb. The best part is, it’s free!

Seems Very Easy?

Try To Add login and Sign up functions.
Ask the user for his/her preferred genre and try to show recommendations according to it.
Add 'Search for Movie,' Option.
Add the "Give Ratings" option.

Quiz App

You mightn't call it a unique project, but it is! If you're a beginner, I'll suggest that you make just a basic Quiz app, but for intermediate developers, I would suggest scaling this quiz app to a bigger scale. Now, let me explain what I meant by 'bigger scale'. You can add awesome features, such as categorized quizzes, points system, sign up and log in, online leaderboard, and many more. For adding questions, you've two ways: the first one is to make your own question API (if you're familiar with backend development), the second and most preferred way is to use an API. I don't think that I need to list APIs. You can easily find some online. If you still find this idea boring, there's one more idea you can try. Create a platform where people can create and attend surveys online. Creators should also be able to see stats related to their surveys like how many people attended surveys, how many of them are male, how many were teens, etc.

Seems Very Easy?

Add an option to buy hints.
In the quiz app, add an option where people can also create and share their projects.
Focus on UI also, not just on logic.

Travel Advisor

Do you love travelling? Well, many of us do. That's what makes this project helpful for both you and for the visitors of this app. At the very beginning level, you can make a basic Map, which shows information as cards when user clicks on a location. For. For intermediates, I would recommend a big scale app, with good UI and UX, and of course, you can take inspirations from big names. You can make this app for the entire world, or for your own country. Food guide, hotel guide, restaurant guide are some features you can add. You can use Google Maps, and of course, you can discover APIs according to the features you're gonna use in your app. Now again, I'm advising you, just because you're making this project to practice React, Don't skip the designing part! Try to be as professional as you can.

Seems Very Easy?

Add a search bar.
Add lists like favorites, add to wishlist, visited, etc.
Add a rating system.

Sports Website

I would recommend this one to only those who are interested in sports. You can also make a website limited to one sport. Now what to put on this website? See, there are plenty of options! You can make a sports news website, score update website, or if you like sports too much, you can even start a blog. I don't think that I need to list sport APIs, there are dozens of them. For beginners who don't know where to find them, you can go to Rapid API. There are 30,000+ APIs available on this platform! If you want to make this project on a larger scale, you can try to mix up ideas. You can make a website which shows the latest scores, news and blogs, just like ESPN.

Seems Very Easy?

Add comments feature.
Work more on UI and UX.

Group Chat App

Before explaining anything else about this project, let me first tell you that this is not that boring and basic chat application idea. In fact, I've enhanced the view. What my idea says is to create an application where people can form groups and chat in that groups, but wait, there's more! People can do a lot more in those groups, including voice calling, video calling, group calling, arrange or join events, and many more. Now, as you can notice, this project is on a bigger scale, so, I don't suggest this project to beginners. You can, of course, add more features according to your interests and creativity. There are some big names from which you can take ideas and inspiration. My favorite ones are Slack and Discord. In fact, Discord inspired this entire project.

Seems Very Easy?

Allow your users to add other people as friends and to chat with them.

The End

That's all for this article. Hope this article helps you. If yes, please leave a comment. If you made any of these projects, kindly share your website/GitHub repository link in comments so that it gives confidence to other developers.
For articles like this, please inspire me just by following me and commenting on this article.
If you want to support me, use my affiliate link to shop online. You just have to buy anything you want from Amazon using my links. You'll not pay anything extra, and I'll get some commission! Hope you got it. If yes, remember to use my link whenever you want to buy anything online. Here's my link.
If you faced any problems during this article, please comment below to solve that.

Thanks For Reading! Happy Coding!