Arrrrgggggghhhhh — I could literally leave the blog there today but I won’t, but I will keep it short.
So today I had my first mock interview, it’s called an external review and I flopped it completely! What is more frustrating is that I flopped it because of a missing space — quite literally ‘ ’ — that little gap.
I will set the scene — I signed up a week ago for my first review, the point is to do it sooner rather than later and as often as you can. Doing this hopefully means I get all my bad habits ironed out early and by the time I get to tech tests in my interviews, I don’t flop there.
Pete, in my dream team, had done one on Thursday and he also flopped, so I am in good company. So 4pm today I left my new group project (more about that tomorrow) and joined this man on a zoom, whose name I now forget, to role play an interview.
The challenge was building a basic school report, by basic I truly mean it — no classes, single method, on paper I was ready to smash it. I asked some pertinent questions in order to plan my tests, I was doing well.
Test driven development process is just that — write a test, make sure it fails, make it pass and repeat. Each test should get incrementally more complex and so the error messages should lead you to fix the code to pass the test and you keep going from there.
We were given a list of ‘grades’ that we had to go through and count and return a report of how many of each. This is so stupidly simple you can understand why when I used the count method and it kept returning 1, even when there were more than 1, I was pulling my hair out.
Long story short, 40 minutes of struggle later I surrendered as the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting the same result. Unfortunately for me I was counting correctly (what I thought the problem was) but I hadn’t prepared the data to be counted properly.
Instead of counting ‘Green’, ‘Green’, ‘Green’ I hadn’t noticed but I was counting ‘Green’, ‘ Green’, ‘ Green’. Can you spot the difference? Hard eh, but there is a space at the start of the second and third Green’s so they weren’t being counted.
Anyway I am pissed but I have to take this as a blessing and I have some learnings too. Firstly, I am blessed this wasn’t in an interview — I gave myself the perfect soft landing if I flopped.
Secondly, I need to get a little practice of my languages everyday, I wouldn’t have made this mistake 2 weeks ago when I was coding 24/7 in Ruby, but for the past 10 days I have been learning JavaScript and so I have let my Ruby knowledge fall out of my head.
Finally, don’t presume — look very hard for the small things that cause errors, they are usually very evident, if you are looking for them!
Time to get back on the horse and go again!
Soca and Software
Today should have been Trinidad Carnival and I was supposed to finally be there! Another reason to cry today but instead I am going to take my lesson from Wetty Beatz. He is here to remind me that what ever trials I go through, my code/Corona whatever, that things will be nice again!
