Interviewing
Interviewing Process
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.