On Track

2nd interview with HackReactor today! This time it was an actual tech interview so I was even more nervous. Once again my interviewer was a pleasure to talk to and very calming. I also picked up my new favorite phrase: “You nailed it with a nail gun.” This was in regards to one of the functions I had to implement. It’s crazy how different my experiences with interviewing for two different schools where. AppAcademy just was not warm and fuzzy at all which I guess is OK, but they just never seemed to care who I was, just what I could do with code. I did OK (got a conditional acceptance pending a final interview) but I felt like they put so much emphasis on logic puzzles, which, heck, shouldn’t they be helping me with in prep to get me a job? I’m also not sure how I feel about the lack of finding out whether I’m some crazy mouth-breather who can’t even interact with people. I just wonder what types of people end up in the class.

HR on the other hand has been surprisingly FUN to interview with. It hasn’t been exactly easy, but it has been fun to play with JavaScript. The first interview was nice and lite and I got to show off that I knew what recursion was (but forgot to add a base case initially - d’oh). Then the take home work was well designed and pushed me along to learn some jQuery and how to pull data using AJAX. Then the last tech interview had me creating my own versions of some Underscore.js functions which was fun and thought-provoking and definitely tricky but not in a gotcha sort of way but more of a pushing me in the right direction to learn it myself. If this is what the class feels like, sign me up!! HR just seems so nurturing and I love to learn.

I should know if I got in (or if I have to try again, because goddamnit I’m trying again if I don’t make it this time) by Friday. Keep your fingers and toes and eyes crossed for me!

Fresh Air

I had my first interview with Hack Reactor today. That was awesome. It was a 180 from my two App Academy interviews. Doug from HackR was amazing. First of all, he was on time! I figured that was a good omen. But then he was also funny and sweet even though my Skype was being funky initially. I felt very at ease by the time the initial coding assessment came around. It was actually kinda fun and straightforward and he told me I’d moved on to the take home and technical interview! We scheduled it on the spot and I took the first opening available (next Tuesday). We then chatted a bit more (I learned that they take about 30 students now and had 5 women the last go round).

Basically I’m just really, really excited and beyond glad I decided to focus on just this program. I think it is exactly what I’m looking for.

Coderbyte and Me

I’ve been practicing my JavaScript for the HackReactor interview on the 20th (wish me luck by the way). They sent around an email saying to be prepared so you didn’t have to reschedule (I’m suddenly glad I couldn’t get an appointment straightaway). They recommended being able to get through all the easy challenges on Coderbyte in < 5 minutes. Yikes? Surprisingly not. I’m having a lot of fun.

There are a couple things I’ve obviously forgotten (I had to look up the regex to keep only alpha characters, I suck at regex), but I’m pretty fast. I’m also realizing just how not amazing I am at the trickier puzzles. There are one or two in there that I still don’t understand, even after I caved and looked up how others solved them (Array Addition I, I’m glaring at you).

There are 26 easy challenges. I’ve decided to run through at least 10 a day, so I finished the first 10 today and uploaded them to my GitHub. My favorite one so far was the TimeConvert, which took a number (e.g. 126) and converted to the amount of hours and minutes (e.g. 2:6). I could have made it prettier by added a preceding 0 in the minutes, but the goal of these is speed and the instructions didn’t ask for that pretty extra. This was my favorite because I just have this weird love for modulus. The code to solve it:

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function TimeConvert(num) {
  var minutes = num % 60;
  var hours = parseInt(num/60);

  return "" + hours + ":" + minutes;
}