Codewars Review — Will Codewars Make You A Better Programmer?

Grant Darling
8 min readFeb 22, 2021

Codewars Review

As a self-taught software developer, I was always overwhelmed by the plethora of options available to teach myself how to code. I know, a tough problem to have! The issue with all these options is that it is difficult to tell what resources are worth spending the time on and which are not.

Codewars does a lot of things well but it’s far from perfect. This is why I wanted to write a Codewars review that focused on the benefits and drawbacks of the platform.

So if you want to find out if Codewars is worth spending your time on, this review is for you.

What Is Codewars?

So what is Codewars? Codewars is an online platform that presents its users with coding challenges called “kata”.

Kata is a Japanese term referring to a pattern of martial arts movements that are practised alone but can also be reviewed within groups.

This definition holds true to the heart of Codewars, as users practice coding algorithms individually and are then exposed to their peers to review their code and be reviewed.

Codewars is a community-built platform, meaning its challenges are designed by its users. The challenges are ranked from 8 to 1 and get increasingly difficult the lower the kata number is.

As of 2021, Codewars supports 29 core languages and 26 additional beta languages. Including the popular esoteric programming language, brainfuck! Good luck solving algorithm problems with that language. Seriously.

As users complete kata they rank up their profile. Making the game rather addictive. Codewars also provides features such as discussion forums, leaderboards and a wiki to learn more about the platform.

Benefits

I want to start by talking about some of the benefits of Codewars since it does have its advantages.

1. Focused on Algorithms

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