Why i love Hackerrank…

Rewind 3 years ago, i was doing my usual ritual of browsing through Quora, reading about everything under the sun. Yes, that happens a lot, i mean a lot on Quora :-P. I ran into this thread, where someone was talking about Adam D’Angelo, Quora founder and previously one of the early employees of Facebook. Adam was one of the most kickass competitive programmers in high school (IOI) and college (ACM). Adam was also the guy who basically helped instagram founders with some scalability issues with a 15 min phone call, the week they released instagram. Yes, he is like a Silicon Valley legend in many ways.

I had never done competitive programming in my life, but i wanted to explore. This lead to a google search, which resulted in the below results:

• TopCoder
• CodeChef
• Hackerrank (Also references of its older name InterviewStreet)

TopCoder, to be honest, felt a bit intimidating. For someone who has never done competitive programming, did not seem like the right choice.

So i started exploring both CodeChef and Hackerrank.

Here are few similarities:

• Both the platform, had a healthy mix of weekend and weekday hack sprints / mini hackathons.
• The problem description, examples, etc, were pretty well thought out, leaving less room for ambiguity.
• Both had sizable communities, i-e people around the world competing in these competitions.

I spent some time on both the platforms, but over the period of time, there was one platform, which continued to improve a ton. I mean a ton. And lets just say, that was the only platform i eventually started using regularly.

It was Hackerrank…

Let me be super clear about my usage:

• When i started out, i used to take up these competitions pretty often, but as life moved on, and i embraced startup life(oh yes, i was the first hire at a now YC + Series A startup) it became less frequent. I have great respect for people who do it more regularly than i do.

Here’s what i loved about hackerrank:

• The folks who are building hackerrank, are genuinely passionate about what they are building, and have taken careful & well thought out steps in building the product.
• I am super excited anytime they released a new feature(loved the hackos idea btw). Rightfully so, exactly what any user of any platform should feel.

Here’s another way to put why Hackerrank is a great product for different types of users:

• Competitive programmers: They still continue to host amazing challenges / hack sprints.
• Software engineers: They have amazing tutorials, and have grouped their offline challenges into well thought out categories.
• Job seekers: They released a Jobs platform, which basically helps companies find the right candidate with specific set of challenges, and for candidate to find the right workplace.
• Hackathon hosts: They make it really easy to host Hackathons ! I hosted one for a meetup a while ago and was a huge success !

Overall, to anyone who fits into any of the above, try Hackerrank now !

PS: I am not affiliated in any way with Hackerrank, just a really happy user.