<story><title>Become a better programmer with programming challenges</title><url>http://macgyverdev.blogspot.com/2014/04/become-better-programmer-with.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jholman</author><text>I agree with several already-existing comments that programming challenges do not help you become a better programmer (assuming that you&amp;#x27;re hireable in the first place).&lt;p&gt;I will note, however, that they DO HELP with interviewing.  The skillset is quite overlapping... artificial time-pressure, artificially contrived problems, cleverness is rewarded, etc.  (But it&amp;#x27;s not entirely the same, because programming contests don&amp;#x27;t give points for half-working answers).&lt;p&gt;Also, IMO the best coding contest site is &lt;a href=&quot;http://code.google.com/codejam/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;code.google.com&amp;#x2F;codejam&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;, because:&lt;p&gt;1) GCJ has unusually clear problem statements.  UVa in particular is terrible for this.&lt;p&gt;2) GCJ supports EVERY programming language (unlike all others I know of except Project Euler)</text></comment>
<story><title>Become a better programmer with programming challenges</title><url>http://macgyverdev.blogspot.com/2014/04/become-better-programmer-with.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>yodsanklai</author><text>Those programming challenges are certainly interesting and they make a great learning tool but they use a very specific set of skills. Usually, the difficult part is to find an algorithm that solves the problem within the given constraints. Implementation is comparatively straightforward.&lt;p&gt;To me, they are more &amp;quot;problem solving contests&amp;quot; than programming contests. The code is just there to validate the solution.</text></comment>