Galen's Adventures in Programming

As I sit here in a hotel room, spending some quality time on Code Signal  (previously CodeFights), I am reminded of a different hotel stay when I first began my official journey to becoming a developer.  I had taken computer science and JavaScript classes years prior, but that was the year I had committed to taking a programming bootcamp and making my dream job into my career. Let me take you back to a sweaty, tropical night in Florida.  It was clearly October because the rain lasted all day, instead of a single hour or two in the afternoon (plus it was my birthday, so the month was pretty clear to me.)  I had spent all day running around the Magic Kingdom at Disney World with my husband, and now we were back in the room and he was fast asleep.  I took out my new-to-me MacBook Pro, and did my very first lesson for my programming bootcamp in a new language: Ruby. I will never forget that trip, for so many reasons.  There was the ice cream sundae riverboa...

It's amazing how important it is to practice for technical interviews.  When I first heard it suggested I thought that it was so you could have experience with the problem your interviewer gave you, but the more I interview the more I think it's about re-wiring your brain to work with logic problems.  It's sort of like crosswords - if you jump right into a hard crossword, you might get one or two unconnected answers and walk away thinking crosswords are impossible. If you start with something simple, though, you can get in the rhythm.  You might recognize a clue or two, or subtle hints in how the clues are worded that will lead you down one thought process as opposed to another.  You might not finish the crossword, but you will at least get one chunk of it finished, and feel like maybe you can do this (with more practice.) The more you practice, the bigger that chunk will get, until you have a crossword with maybe one or two blanks.  Then if you tackle that ha...

Today was a big milestone for me - I completed my first coding assessment as part of an interview process.  It was 25 minutes of just me and the computer, sharing my screen and trying to type comments of my thought process so the person watching my assessment later isn't just watching a static screen as I thought about the best way to go about it.  My solution wasn't very elegant, but I think it did solve the problem. The best part about the whole coding assessment--even though I was nervous about 25 minutes deciding whether or not a company would want to continue the interview process--was that it was still fun!  Regardless of whether my solution was correct or not, or whether my thought process was sufficient to allow me to continue on in the interview process, I really enjoy writing code.  That's what it all comes down to, and I am so lucky that I have the opportunity to make money doing something that I enjoy this much.