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Comment by cag_ii | Hacker News Reader

Maybe just skip the game sites.

Go to github, find a project that you find interesting and relevant to your position.

Take a look at the open bugs and try to fix some. Even if you don't feel comfortable sending a pull request you can learn a lot by going through the whole process on a real project.

Alternatively, take a look at the recent commits and what they fix...

https://github.com/topics/php

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My recent interviewing experience, while anecdotal, would suggest that you'd actually be better off with the coding challenge sites, assuming that succeeding at interviewing is your goal.

I think this is unfortunate, irrational, and that contributing to Github projects would actually build your practical skills while adding some value to the universe.

But having spent more time working on coding challenges, algorithms and puzzles would have been more beneficial to my most recent several interviews.

It's a trade-off. One thing that's definitely going to get you more and better interviews is a section on your resume that lists major open-source projects you've contributed to. But yes, once you hit the interview you still might hit the old-style puzzle questions depending on the company.

You don't need to make a trade off. You can do both contribute meaningfully to an open source project AND practice on Codewars.

What top companies exist that don't ask candidates to solve coding challenges?

Along those lines, find projects that have "up for grabs"[1]. I was trying to learn Go for personal enrichment and learned tons about real-world Go by opening a PR.

[1]: http://up-for-grabs.net/#/tags/PHP

Good call on at least reviewing fixes on github. I was going for the game sites because I just want to get the trivial gotchas of the language out of the way, get a feel for what error messages look like on some basic stuff.

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