For the last few months, I’ve tried to do sometimes in my free time what is often called “code katas”.

A code kata is an exercise in programming which helps a programmer hone their skills through practice and repetition.

Basically, you try to solve problems by writing algorithms. If you don’t know what to solve, there are a lot of platforms you can look at to find exercises:
– CodinGame
– Prologin (in French)
– Rosalind (bioinformatics challenges)
– Kaggle (machine learning competitions)

On most of these platforms, you can “play” alone. You are given a problem with detailed instructions, a dataset and an example of the expected output. Your goal will be to solve this problem. You will know if you have successfully solved the problem when you will submit your solution (usually you can use the language of your choice) thanks to automated unit tests.

I like to solve unusual problems, and most of the time they are more difficult than what I work on on a daily basis (at least when you’ve done enough exercices). This is a great opportunity to discover advanced algorithms or to learn a new language. Because you do this in your time it’s always nice to know than these problems can usually be solved in less than 1 hour, and also that you will not need to maintain your implementation in the future! When you’ve successfully solved a problem, you’re done for real 🙂

If you wanna check what I’ve already done, and maybe to see how I’ve done it, I’ve got a public GitHub repository dedicated to this: github.com/AntoineAugusti/katas.