Personal Brand - Week 3

Hello again! Welcome to this week’s post. This week I was focused on solving DSA exercises at Hackerrank. This algorithmic exercises are very common in technical interviews, and the best way to get better at them is to practice.

As I mentioned in previous weeks, the problems marked as easy are straightforward, but then there are problems marked as medium difficulty that can be very difficult. I found out that many problems have an “aha!” moment, where the problem gets easy once you grasp an important concept related to it. For example, I was able to easily solve a sorting problem (medium difficulty) using count sort, but I can’t help but wonder if I didn’t know count sort then the problem must’ve been more difficult.

Other problem I’ve faced when solving these exercises is the Einstellung effect, which is a predisposition to solve a problem in a specific way and not giving enough thought to other (sometimes better) options. Fortunately, in the first weeks of the program I took a course called Learning How to Learn by Barbara Oakley which discussed how to tackle this problem, such as giving ourselves time away from the problem and letting the diffuse mode kick in. I highly recommend that course, it doesn’t matter what are you learning.

Also, I am still getting lots of timeout errors in the Hackerrank platform, because JS programs are limited to 10-second runs. I’ve been seriously considering changing languages, but I later found out that it is better to optimize the algorithm and not blame the language used. Many times I came up with a simple approach (i.e brute force) and didn’t optimize when there are much more efficient solutions. Don’t be afraid to ask for hints!

Next week I will have a mock interview where I will be solving a DSA problem in front of various persons! I am a little nervous but I am confident that if I keep practicing I will be able to do the best I can. I am excited to be taking advantage of concepts I first learned some months ago in the Encora’s Apprentice Program, this keeps me motivated to do my best and keep learning!

Keep on coding!