30 Days of Code

In my last blog entry, I told more about my awesome experience in Duolingo learning French. (and English too). Since there, I have lost my streak at 143 days. A nice personal achievement! Looking back, it was a lot of French and many other lost streaks. I am amazed by how far my French becomes better. Now I can read and listen French easily. Read news, podcasts and other media.

For the future, I am making a transition away from Duolingo and using that time in the “real-world”. One great option is the Ici Radio Canada (a famous Canada national public radio and tv broadcaster). They have lots of good shows, and definitely is a good place to keep improving your French, and as a bonus, the Canadian accent. Enough with the French learning!

Going to the main topic of this post, I’ve decided to put myself into another challenge. This would be an easy one at first. It’s called 30 Days of Code. To put this into context, recently I read the outstanding 2018 Developer Skills Report from HackerRank. If you are a programmer like me, this is a quick and interesting report that subtly reveals many important transformations that are happening in the world right now.

One question that stood out to me was:

Which core competencies do employers look for?

Impressively (or not) 94.9% of the employers answered Problem-Solving Skills. Well above of the 56.6% that said Programming language proficiency (second position) or the Debugging skills with 47.1% (third position).

I can’t agree more with the employers on this question. Problem-Solving is one of the best skill to have these days. Besides that, is just rewarding when you can find a way (or ways) to solve a puzzle. I like to consider myself an agnostic programmer (besides working daily only with a few languages).

In the past few years, I’ve been solving some Computer Problems from a few other awesome places like UriOnline or TopCoder. This challenge could be an opportunity to reinforce that!

Besides being an apparently easy challenge to non-beginner programmers, this 30 Days of Code challenge from HackerRank seems to be a good way to force myself to work on concepts like Data Structures or to practice a language that I don’t use every day, since HackerRank supports lots of languages. So if you are an experienced programmer, this could be a nice way to put your knowledge to a test.

For today, I’ve just started with a Day-0 (Hello World) challenge. I will make another post when I finish the 30 days! From what I have seen this could be a good starting point for beginners programmers alike.

Happy Coding!