Today was all about interviewing. I did 3 rounds of interviews, for a total of
- 1.5 hours being interviewed
- 3.5 hours interviewing and giving feedback
I was pretty exhausted at the end and went home earlier than usual.
The interview rounds are structured in 30 min sessions that everyone gets, I was pretty pleased with my last one, where I was able to:
- reason about the problem
- come up with some more input tests to make sure I got the problem
- come up with an algorithm that covered all cases
- show the reasoning with pseudocode
- implement the algorithm in JavaScript
Actually one thing that came to mind while thinking about the algorithm was to make it simpler not thinking about my problem, but an easier version, just by doing so I was able to tackle the bigger problem with relative ease, because I did it in small steps.
One other thing that's helping me, a lot, is whishful programming where I just consider that I have some functions I need, write the signature using Haskell-like notation, and defer the actual implementation of those later on. If and when I get to the final solution I then discuss about those, which are always trivial enough.
A few examples might be:
- a function that loops through an array giving the current and the next element
- a function that compares two period of times
- a function that sorts a list based on some parameter that I talked about
Whishful programming all the things!