Julia's coding blog - Practice makes perfect

From January 2015, she started to practice leetcode questions; she trains herself to stay focus, develops "muscle" memory when she practices those questions one by one. 2015年初, Julia开始参与做Leetcode, 开通自己第一个博客. 刷Leet code的题目, 她看了很多的代码, 每个人那学一点, 也开通Github, 发表自己的代码, 尝试写自己的一些体会. She learns from her favorite sports – tennis, 10,000 serves practice builds up good memory for a great serve. Just keep going. Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.

Thursday, December 21, 2017

How to find time to work on coding challenges?

Dec. 21, 2017

Introduction

I had a mock interview on Dec. 20, 2017 10:00 PM. And I was asked how to find the time to improve the coding skills and become a competitive programmer.

There are risks to spend time working on the data structure and algorithm. Since we only have limit hours to work on coding every day, sometimes if we do spend time on training, drills for practicing data structure and algorithm, then we will find that we are short of time to deal with daily tasks.

Just trust that the practice and drills will make you a strong player. Find ways. Write best code in the world, most elegant code with style called readable, clean as possible.

Train insane or remain the same

It is my favorite quote to encourage myself to train myself.

Professional tennis players train themselves, in order to play 2 or 3 hours matches, they practice hundreds of hours. Hitting partners, mental trainers, coaches, and all kinds of get-together practice with peers, there are a lot of people get involved with training. Sports is fun to watch, but all those hard work and training is tough to go through. Same as I train myself to develop crafting skills, it is hard and it is not easy at all.

Coding skill is like the weight control project. In order to stay fit, we have to change life style, related to my own case, I have to be a sports player, and also need to study everything about tennis. Also I have to control my diet, and choose to eat unprocessed food as possible. Coding skills is the same.

We have to learn how to take care of ourselves as a individual contributor, as a software programmer. Work on crafting skills, share and document the practice, journal the practice and keep improving. I also learn to encourage other peers do the same thing, it is not easy to work on training.

Code study

Best and quick way to evaluate myself coding skill is to find some code I write. It is hard to learn the fact that I was not a good programmer at all back in year of 2013.

I shared my coding sample back in 2013. After full time work 4 years, I could not write a short and clean code in less than 15 lines. Instead of the clean, readable code, I wrote over 80 lines of code to make me try to hide the sample code 3 years afterwards.

What I did in last 3 years is a lot of challenge work. I have to work on so many issues.