Estimating Time to Solve Coding Exercises as a Junior Developer

Hey there,

I’m using Exercism to sharpen my coding skills and wanted to gather some quick insights on how to estimate the time needed for each coding exercise. I have a background in js and react and learning python. questions:

  1. How do you estimate time for Exercism exercises? Any strategies or rules of thumb?
  2. Do you track your progress in terms of time spent on each exercise?
  3. Any tips for managing time while learning and diving deeper into coding?

Take an example the intro to dictionaries exercise

Your quick advice would be greatly appreciated.

My tip is: Don’t care about how much time you spend, the goal is to learn not to speed run. it is better to write properly written code than just quickly written code.

Also, it is very hard to give a hard limit, some exercises require/benefit some beforehand knowledge, examples are Poker or complex numbers. If you never worked with complex numbers or played poker, you more or less need to do some digging into those subjects which can take some time in itself.

The way Exercism is set up, you often don’t know the full requirements and complexity of an exercise when you start working on it, which makes time estimates very hard to do.

Also see How long should take resolve exercise? - #5 by iHiD