Personal Brand — Week Three
My Performance Interview
Learning to control my nerves
This week I had my performance interview (so exciting, right?) that is why I kept reviewing my notes from the last phase and reading many things related to software engineering, computer science and both of my primary stacks (JavaScript and Java), but most importantly, I investigated techniques and advices about how to control my nerves and be calm.
The breathing exercise I mentioned in my last blog: Personal Brand — Week Two was really helpful before I took my interview, I mean, I still was nervous at the beginning, but thanks to the 4–7–8 breathing technique I could be calmer than normal, I personally recommend to try this technique, it could make a difference.
This week I also finished reading 8 chapters of the book: Cracking The Coding Interview, I will work on a review for it. The advices, information and questions you can find in this book are really valuable, especially for those like me who are at the beginning of their career as a software engineer.
Doing more challenges and studying new topics
How I mentioned, I continue studying before my interview, I reinforce my knowledge in programming paradigms as Object Oriented Programming, something important I learned was the difference between inheritance and composition, and in which situations is better to use them, for keeping it short:
- We can use inheritance when we know there is an “is a” relationship between a child and its parent class.
- We can use composition in cases where one object “has” (or is part of) another object.
In addition, I learned some Design Patterns, the one that I most liked was the “Observer” because it made me think about things that I hadn’t thought of before, like how app as Facebook work internally when you decide to follow someone, that was very interesting to analyze, basically the Observer pattern works as follow:
Is a one-to-many dependency between objects so that when one object changes state, all its dependents are notified. This is typically done by calling one of their methods
We can think of Twitter for example, when you follow someone you are essentially asking Twitter to send you (the observer) tweet updates of the person (the subject) you followed. The pattern consists of two actors, the observer who is interested in the updates and the subject who generates the updates.
Besides of these subjects, I wanted to focus more on my primary stack too (JavaScript) so I went deep through the language and I learned many new things about it, specially things related to the most relevant additions in ES6 as:
- let and const keywords
- for…of loop
- Template literals
- Arrow functions
- Spread operator
… Classes and other keywords that allows developers to work with an Oriented Object Programming with JavaScript.
I found this cool repository that collects all ES6 features with examples:
So overall, I did a great review among all the topics that I could, and on Wednesday, I had my performance interview. I was nervous at first, but the interviewers were so nice and friendly that as the interview went on I began to feel confident. It was a good experience, they gave me feedback with the answers where I had problems and also complemented those where I did not respond in greater depth.
I learned too much with the performance interview and now I know what are the subjects where I need to improve (most of them related to hardware). I feel satisfied and enthusiastic for continue improving.
That’s all for this week, I hope you liked reading my blog, thank you and see you next time!
