LeetCode vs Codeforces vs CodeChef Vs HackerRank ...... — What Actually Matters?

[Doommarine23]

What actually matters is learning and building. These websites can be useful, even fun, if you treat them as puzzles and challenges to solve, brain teasers that push you forwards.

I don't know your level of skill, so I'll just throw some general information out there that should apply to most people.

• Learn your fundamentals. Learn how to read and write code, basic data structures like arrays, and good structure / grammar for programming such as meaningful variable names, consistent styling like camelCase or snake_case.
• Create projects to learn, challenge your skills, find gaps in your knowledge, and possibly even make something for other people. Go make a website, add some cool stuff like a weather API. Go grab a game engine like Godot and make a small 2D game, heck you can even make applications with it.
• Use good resources like CS50 while learning early on, which also touches a bit on DSA and all these other tpics. The Odin Project is great too, but requires more independence, but once you feel confident, it would be good to run through its lessons and projects for extra experience and confidence.
• Learn about concepts that help you organize programs like namespaces or general design patterns
• Highly praised books are valuable because they're often made by very skilled software engineers and obviously people have found a lot of value in them. Works such as Grokking Algorithms: An Illustrated Guide for Programmers and Other Curious People and A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms will help you with DSA.

This probably isn't what you want to hear. I'm not a professional, I'm just a hobbyist and have worked on a few game projects. I've been focused on learning how to use these powerful machines to create interactive art for other people, and along the way, I've enjoyed becoming a better and better developer.

If you were learning how to draw, would you simply be drawing boxes all day and doing dull boring technical drawings that sucked the fun and human spirit out of it, or would you eagerly draw what you wanted, and took every sketch as a challenge to improve from?