Reflection Questions
- What worked well in your process? I was able to come up with a solution pretty quickly, and it worked. I was able to explain aloud why it worked.
- What was difficult/where did you struggle? I struggled to come up with an optimized solution. I knew what was suboptimal about my solution (nested iterations), but couldn't think of a way to complete the task WITHOUT them.
- What feedback/discussion did you have with your peer? We compared notes- we had used similar iterator methods (reduce and filter) to solve the problem. She had not begun thinking about ways to optimize, so I showed her the research I was doing.
- Is there anything you want to change about your approach to the next technical challenge? I'd like to ride the struggle bus and try harder to come up with a more optimal solution before researching.
Reflection Questions
- What worked well in your process? Like yesterday, I came up with a non-optimized solution without needing to research.
- What was difficult/where did you struggle? I got stuck on the idea that I needed to take out each element after having looped over it, but that was unnecessary and resulted in a lot of extra/wasted time.
- What feedback/discussion did you have with your peer? We just shared our solutions and then talked about the optimized solution I found afterwards.
- Is there anything you want to change about your approach to the next technical challenge? I mean, obviously I don't want to get hung up on a track that isn't going to work, but I don't know how I'll recognize that when it's happening.
- If this isn’t your first technical challenge: Were you able to improve your approach? What went better? Did not improve my approach.
Day 3: I did a tech challenge in front of Corey as a mock interview. He had me write a "make change" function.
- What worked well in your process? I did a lot of pseudocoding and talked about my process. I asked thoughtful questions, checked my assumptions.
- What was difficult/where did you struggle? I forgot all math and got super frustrated with myself at not being able to do simple things. This led to some negative self-talk, which Corey rightly pointed out I should not ever do in a tech challenge.
- What feedback/discussion did you have with your peer? Corey gave a bunch of good feedback.
- Is there anything you want to change about your approach to the next technical challenge? I need to work on not being frustrated.
- If this isn’t your first technical challenge: Were you able to improve your approach? What went better? Nope, did not improve.
- What worked well in your process? I did a ton of helpful pseudocoding. I wrote myself an additional array matrix for input. I didn't get frustrated.
- What was difficult/where did you struggle? It took me a really long time.
- What feedback/discussion did you have with your peer? She and I compared notes. She did research off the bat and approached the problem differently.
- Is there anything you want to change about your approach to the next technical challenge? Not really, I did okay today. I still want to do some googling and find an optimized solution, because I'm 100% sure there's a better one out there.
- If this isn’t your first technical challenge: Were you able to improve your approach? What went better? I was able to work through the problem, though I wasn't doing it in front of anyone.
- What do you want to continue working on? a) doing tech challenges in front of people without getting flustered and losing all my knowledge! b) increasing my comfort / ability to use recursion c) getting better at 'brute force' solutions rather than getting hung up on the best way to solve a problem.
- How will you continue working on it? a) do a challenge per day b) seek out opportunities to do mock tech challenges with others
- How can you keep yourself accountable? (ex. meet with peers, meet with a mentor, continue with weekly reflections, etc.) a) keep working with mentor, time block challenge time each day