Phase 3 — Week 4

We’re in the last week of this phase, there are a lot of things done this week and most of them are still in progress. Let’s start from the beginning.

As I said last week, probably the most time consuming during this phase is looking for an issue. Everyone can read documentation and the code, but being able to choose an issue it’s hard and even more so after something that happened to me.

Last week I talked to my mentors about how hard it is to find an issue for my second stack, mostly because even when I’ve used it before I’m not as confident as I’m with my primary stack. We saw an issue that seemed relatively easy so I started to work on it. The mistake I made was not reading the documentation first and jumping to the code right away. I kinda solved the issue but when I was doing the PR I hesitate because I haven’t had the issue assigned to me so didn’t know if it was a good idea to do it, I decided to look for the rules’ contribution, there I found how the library actually works and that the issue was a misunderstanding from the original poster and the project worked just well. Because of that I decided to look for an issue that have already a thread(if possible) or that is updated more often.

Also lately I have been reading and solving some problems from the book “Cracking the coding interview”. This book is really good and comes from the experience of an interviewer. There’re some tips that goes beyond technical skills but also how to build a good CV and show the experience through projects and assessments and how to behave in the interview in terms of social interaction.

I want to read more and be prepared for the real interview but whats more, this also helped me to have a learning path because I didn’t have one until now, at the beginning I started studying graphs and path finding algorithms because those weren’t subjects with which I was familiar. Know I have practiced more those algorithms as well as calculating the time complexity.

I’m feeling more confident with the interview process as well as starting to recognize the patterns of some problems from the bock and hacker rank. Finally, to retain that information I have been practices every night (as learned in the first phase) so we can recall the informations instead of re-studying everything from time in time.