Continued Learning
Continued Learning

Extending the Fundamentals

Scrimba

We’ve completed most of the Scrima content during the course, but some are still left. You should complete them now.

⁠
https://scrimba.com/learn/python⁠
⁠

The projects at the end of the course also give more insight into how to pull everything you’ve learnt together.

Exercism

If you feel you want to go over the basics again in a bit more depth and with more technical language we can recommend

Exercism⁠

Exercism goes into more technical depth than some of the other guided courses online, which is great for where you are now but not so great when you were starting out with zero experience.

Professional High Performance

To succeed in work, you need to be highly technical and pair this with high-performance behaviours and skills. We’ll cover these in detail in the course, but you can get a head start on this by reading through and thinking about these behaviours.

Go to the

Prof. High Performance⁠

page to get started

Problem Solving

One of the critical skills that you will develop with Sigma Labs is the ability to solve complex problems. However, the first step to doing that is solving smaller, more easily solvable problems first and building up your problem-solving muscle.

Codewars

We highly recommend using

Codewars⁠

. They host 1000s of coding problems entirely for free with an active community of coders to compare your answers against.

Completing just one problem every day between when you start the course will leave you in a much better place than otherwise.

Here are some tips for using Codewars:

Start with the more straightforward 8 Kyu problems - remember - you are building muscle here, so don’t jump straight to the 200kg weights.

Some of the challenges on Codewars are quite ‘maths-y’. If this isn’t where you feel strongest, skip them until you find the ones you can struggle with.

After completing the challenge, review the other solutions; however, ignore the ones with the overly clever syntax you don’t understand. Good code is easy-to-understand code - not clever code. If you don’t understand it, then it may be bad code.

Advent of Code

We can also recommend

Advent of Code⁠

as a good resource to push you to solve problems. They are released every year in the run-up to Christmas, but you can go back through the past years and complete them at your leisure.

Here are some tips for using Advent of Code:

Challenges 1 to 5 are normally fairly manageable, but when you get past those they do become very, very hard. Don’t be afraid to get up to a challenge you can’t do and then move on to another year.

You’ll need to know how to read in text from a file to be able to do these challenges. You can read how to do this

here⁠