Hey there! The number of free platforms available now for you to work on your skills is uncountable. There are hundreds of platforms out there to help you sharpen your skills, and sometimes even venture into new ones. But it’s essential that you know how to make the most out of any platform. But if you are a newbie to this platform and are confused about using various challenges and services here effectively, this will cover that. Here we will discuss how a beginner in Competitive Programming or CodeChef can use the platform effectively to get the best results.

Participate in monthly Challenges

If you are a beginner in any given field, let it be literature or programming, your foremost priority would be to have a strong foundation in basics and build your way up, right? Having a solid grip on various algorithms would take you a long way. With CodeChef’s monthly Long Challenge, you can learn a new algorithm or technique each time. This monthly challenge is usually held at the beginning of each month and lasts for ten days. This duration is a pretty long period for you to understand the problems in each challenge, try to figure out which algorithm to apply, and then head over and learn them.

The next step for you is participating in short challenges such as Cook-Off, Lunchtime, and Starters. These are for a much shorter duration (around three hours), and therefore you would experience the pressure and time constraints like a standard placement test. The continuous practice of these two types of challenges would ensure that you learn a new concept every time and improve your speed and logical skills at the same time. 

Video Editorials to learn new concepts 

It is very rare that a person solves all the given questions in a challenge. After each challenge, the solutions for every question are released as a part of video editorials in the CodeChef YouTube channel. So right after the challenge is done, you can head over to the YouTube team and find the solution for the question you were unable to tackle. In each video, you can find a very detailed explanation of the question, the concepts and algorithms required to solve them, and a step-by-step explanation of the solution code and logic as well. With these video editorials, you can upskill yourselves and know how to solve every problem as well.

Learn DSA

It is a well-known fact that Data Structures Algorithms or DSA is an agglomeration of very important topics. Getting a proper hang of these would help in theory as well as the practical implementation of these. With the Learn DSA with CodeChef, you will find resources from the very basic to advanced DSA topics. These are hand-picked and curated by experts in the subject for beginners to understand everything about a topic and not miss out on important topics. 

Ada August-a Challenge

The Ada August-a Challenge was a month-long series held in August 2021 to help the newbies in the programming world. The questions in this challenge are to test out the basics that you need to know before you move on to much higher topics. As you solve and proceed with each question, the difficulty level will also increase. You can check out 

this blog to get a much more elaborate idea about this challenge.

Well coder, now that you know all the resources that you need to start your programming journey, set sail right away captain!

Adios!