Personal Brand - Week 2
January 31, 2022Welcome to my blog! Like every Monday, I’ll reflect on what I learned the previous week.
This week I had a mock interview. This was no ordinary mock interview because I didn’t attend as the interviewee, instead, I was the interviewer. “How is this useful?” you might ask, well, it turns out that it is incredibly insightful to be on the other side of the interview because you can see the process of a typical tech interview from another perspective; also, I had to research how to conduct the interview effectively, make a dynamic list of questions, make a grading rubric, and brush up on C#/.NET concepts because that was the interviewee’s tech stack. The insights I gained from this interview include what the interviewer is looking for in your answers, how to formulate good answers, what questions are effective in case you don’t understand what is asked, and how to manage nervousness. Bits of knowledge that will surely come in handy when it is my turn to get interviewed (hopefully soon!).
Also, the rest of the week I was focused on solving Hackerrank problems. I am trying to develop impeccable algorithmic thinking, so now I am writing solutions on paper before trying to code them, I find it very useful because you can focus more on the logical steps than on the code and its nuances (i.e “Should I iterate with a for loop or forEach method?”). Additionally, I would like to say that iterative development is great. The process I’m following right now is to design a basic algorithm first, with the first ideas that come to mind, which then will be improved to reduce time/space complexity. Hackerrank’s system has been useful for this because it has a time constraint while running JavaScript programs (10 seconds IIRC) which makes most of my first approaches throw a timeout error (the downsides of using an interpreted language!) and forces me to improve the algorithm to make it work within the constraint.
That’s all for this week, the next one I’ll be writing more about DSA problems and how I’m approaching them.