Is Competitive Programming Important?

A year and a half from today if someone had asked me "What should I be doing to become a good computer science engineer?". My answer would have been learning different languages, technologies & tools. But at some point at the end of my second year, I got confused about what to learn. I tried learning multiple languages which stood a bad idea. Also during my second year, I came to know about "competitive programming". I got all excited and did start from HackerRank, I used to solve questions with one of my friend Shimeer Hablani. During the "Placement season" in my third year, I came to know the level of importance of competitive programming. Competitive programming isn't just important for placement, it's the essence of computer science. We brainstorm and find logic to some mind-boggling problems and then convert that logic into code which is amazing. So, the conclusion is that although we might want to learn multiple languages, technologies, etc. which is great and important too, in the end, we'll still need to have a logic to solve any problem we face while building a product. It isn't that I have become the best coder, but I know the importance of it and I am working on it. What matters is the effort.

Even after knowing that competitive programming is important, I didn't give much heat to it , which I realized later. But as the proverb goes "Better late than never".

All you need to do is start solving a few problems and I am sure you'll enjoy.

There are a bunch of resources to start off like Hackerrank, HackerEarth, Code chef. All you need to do is try to get a solution and even after brainstorming for a long time you don't find any solution, search for a video or an article on that problem understand the logic, try to code. If all of this doesn't work just read the code and understand what is happening. Competitive coding also has much more details which you'll get to know once you start.

 Competitive programming helps out us be a great programmer and I say that because of some my friends like Vaibhav Biturwar, Shimeer Hablani, Aakash Sinha