September, 2021 - Victor Huynh

Roadblock

2021-09-272021-09-27

Probably one of the things that I’ve been experiencing and struggling with lately, because I really am not sure what the best way to approach things are. This is probably just a self-reflection step, but I’ve been thinking a lot about whether or not I should prioritize leveling up my technical, hard skills, or try to land more interviews first, and worry about the technical grind later. In theory, I did save up enough savings to survive and pay rent for half a year, but I’m not sure if I’m willing to deplete that resource during this phase of my life.

Perhaps the best approach would be to do both, but at the same time I’m struggling to prioritize between

Blogging (this is my form of journalling in a sense)
Technical skills (i.e. leetcode, codewars)
Knowledge gains (i.e. reading technical blogs/articles/books)
Portfolio gains (i.e. getting something to show/talk about on my resume)
Fitness goals (i.e. getting to the weight that I want, working on my strength/agility)
Sports goals (i.e. working on my skill, footwork in basketball/volleyball)
YouTube videos (this was especially tough for me because it feels like a lot of work for the least gains)
Social interactions (I’ve largely decided to cut down, because it was a big source of time sink)
and Reading (sometimes I’ve been caught up in doing other stuff that I felt like it was okay to skip reading days)

It’s been a lot to juggle, and I think I need to take a step back and think about what my time allocation and approach should be. It’s definitely been tough, even when I’m not working full-time, especially with a steady stream of rejections coming into my mailbox (lol). It seems like I don’t have enough time on my hands, even though I’ve been trying to maximize my time and efficiency. Interesting predicament.

Learning

Next Steps for October

2021-09-262021-09-26

Whenever I think about creating YouTube comment, it is difficult to think about specific things to be shared. For me, I thought it would be enough getting practice in, and sharing thoughts or thought process, but it seems to be a lot of repetition if I did so. However, I do think that once I start projects, there is probably more room for content and progression tracking. That might be the vibe down the road, but right now I definitely have been putting it off more than I liked. I was struggling with getting enough content to fit under a certain video length, mostly because I dont like the idea of videos that are too long.

Moving forward, for the month of October, I am going to be working on my problem solving skills and language familiarity (JavaScript) as my central focus. I feel like it was a result of unfamiliarity and lack of problem solving preparation that I didn’t land the jobs that I interviewed for during September. On a side note, I think that my time effectiveness is higher overall, but I still find myself getting sidetracked easily, this will be a work in progress as well. I do think that too much social interaction is detrimental for the gains, but there is a certain balance that would promote good growth.

Interviewing

Interviewing Process

2021-09-192021-09-19

So this blog post is a little late because I was trying to focus up on a set of interviews that I had for the week of September 12-19. I think they went well, but I’m hoping for some good news, finger crossed.

My strategy going into this was detailed in my About page, and I basically spent a lot of my time going through Cracking the Coding Interview, and spent additional time making sure that I understood and remembered the important data structures and algorithms. I feel like those are key when it came down to getting through the initial interview process, and I don’t think I was too far off.

However, I did feel like I could have spent a little more time doing some problems, because I felt like that would have gave me a better sense of language syntax that definitely needed to be brushed up on. During one of the interviews, the Data Structures & Algorithms one, even though I was coding in JavaScript (supposedly one of my more comfortable languages), I made a pretty easy syntax error.

The error in question was with ForEach, what went down was

(forEach var in options) {
}
// then I realized that it was an Object function, so I changed it to
options.forEach(var){
}
// then I had a syntax error when running the function, and in actuality I had to pass a function into forEach
options.forEach((var) => {
});

Pretty embarassing mistake, and I felt like after doing some more problems, I would have been way more comfortable writing code using these language specific functions. I spent more time on the actual theory than language specific application, which I think was a mistake, but mistakes happen. I hope it wasn’t a make or break thing lol.

My next steps would be

Complete all the practice problems in CTCI
Spend more time doing practice problems (currently doing codewars for JS)
After more confidence is made, work on learning as I create as learn before I create

It would probably be better for the interviewing process if I deployed projects right away, to have something to show and talk about, but I feel like I should solidify any questions and knowledge gaps first before I work on my Git stuff.

In theory, I would like to write beautiful, clean, and modular code right away, but I feel like there’s too much rust in my abilities at my current stage.

Codewars Progress Rank:7 kyu Honor:70 Total Completed Kata:13

YouTube

First Video uploaded on YouTube

2021-09-072021-09-07

So today, on September 7, 2021, I finally got to uploading my first YouTube video!

It was a relieving experience to finally get my first video uploaded, because I was pretty worried that it wouldn’t turn out the way that I wanted to. However, I feel like it will always have rough beginnings, and I figured I’d do what I could to make the content as short as possible (due to low attention span meta) and straight to the point.

For next steps, I feel like I didn’t really have to do everything in one take (I took many takes, in fact), but there were still times when I would stutter or say something that I didn’t mean to say. I already recorded the screen and it was lined up to my audio/video, so I felt like it was too much of a hassle to edit it out. Next time, I will probably edit the audio/video first, and then fill in the content after – definitely felt like a rookie mistake.

I did feel like the editing software (Camtasia, yes I paid for it) was relatively easy and effective to use. However, I do have a big gripe about it — it does not support Nvidia Broadcast for some reason. I’m not sure if it’ll be a make or break kind of deal, but it does suck that I don’t get extra video sharpening / background blurring because Camtasia refuses to support it.

Overall, I’m excited. It definitely feels like I got some progression in (also got a blog post out on the same day) and am eager to keep it going and see what I can come out with.