Personal Brand - Week 1

Greetings!

New week, new goals. This week was the first one of the Personal Brand phase of Encora’s Apprentice Program. It consists of us learning the required skills to confidently promote our skills in a professional environment, be it technical skills or soft skills (remember, both are important!). It also consists of interview preparation, like practicing DSA (Data Structures and Algorithms), our English communication, and how to explain our professional experience in a clear and relatable way. It is a great phase because I feel like I need to polish many of these skills and having an open space to practice and receive feedback is greatly appreciated.

This week I have been focusing on solving technical interview questions (DSA problems) inside the Hackerrank platform. I started solving these types of questions with the Interview Preparation Kit provided and I had fun so I continued to do it all week long, I am using JavaScript to solve them because I want to practice using it to manipulate common data structures and many built-in methods are very useful for these questions, some examples are: map, filter, reduce, slice, split, etc. The questions marked as easy were, unsurprisingly, not hard and took little time to solve, but I tried some medium difficulty questions later on and I immediately noticed the change. It seems that these questions involve more Computer Science concepts than the previous ones, for example, the last one I was working on involved recursion, whereas the simple ones could be solved straightforwardly with iteration. I am reviewing these core concepts to have more tools available as I keep solving technical interview questions, there is an excellent resource in the form of a book called Cracking the Coding Interview which has insightful tips on how to prepare for an interview, tips and tricks to solve technical questions, and real-life information on various companies’ interview process.

A review of the book is coming soon!

Apart from interviews, I am also in the process of improving how employers see me, to achieve this I am reviewing and improving my resume, professional profile on LinkedIn, and every other profile relevant to my technical experience (Hackerrank, GitHub, etc.) I am a believer in having a good online presence so people can know who you are and what you do easily, I got this idea in the previous phase where I was contributing to Open Source projects, having a presence there and people remembering you can have lots of good consequences. Who knows, maybe even once-in-a-lifetime opportunities!

Finally, I want to talk about an activity we are having next week. We are doing mock interviews to get used to the process and ease the nerves a little, and I think it’s a great idea because perfect practice makes perfect. It is even better because we get to experience both sides of the process: as an interviewer and as an interviewee. Sure, we should be focused on being the ones interviewed because that’s what we are going to do in the future, but experiencing both sides gives useful insight into how the interviewers think and how you might look to them.

Next week I’ll write about how the mock interviews went and what I learned from them.

Keep practicing DSA!