What did you learn today?

Today, our knowledge and skills were put to the test with the a hiring assessment! This has been a long anticipated day for me since I’m ready to wave goodbye to weekly assessments and fast-paced sprints. I’m sure the pace is similar to that of the industry, but I’m just excited to not focus on projects in the coming weeks.

For the hiring assessment, we cloned down a repository from GitHub and began work on 15 prompts. We had about 5 hours to complete the prompts, and we could leverage our lunch time to continue working if needed. The prompts covered topics from JavaScript basics, HTML and CSS, data structures, front end frameworks (Backbone.js and Angular.js), asynchronous programming (ajax calls and callbacks), server side routing and Node.js, databases, authentication, task automation, and testing.

After our allotted time came to an end, I felt pretty confident. I’d say a 9 out of 10. I made some minor mistakes on implementing a queue, and I’m not completely sure if I correctly wrote an decent test suite for a hash table’s insert and retrieve function, and I’m certain that my authentication implementation isn’t up to cryptographic standards (apparently Math.random() is not random enough for crypto and hashing passwords). All in all, I’m happy with my effort. The assessment definitely covered all of the content we had been exposed to over the last 6 weeks, and I’m thankful it’s over.

Did you learn anything new about yourself?

I did a lot of incremental testing today throughout my self-assessment. It was nice to see that my focus on incremental code development over the last two weeks helped me on the hiring assessment. I do well when I focus on a few goals from week to week.

Anything you want to do differently tomorrow?

I’m beyond excited to sleep in tomorrow. Glorious, glorious sleep. Other than that, I’m going to relax and go to the beach, which is one of my favorite places to be when the sun’s out.

To get my head out of programming, I started working on the data visualization remake today. I’ve identified some elements of a story, and I’ve identified the chart types that I want to use. Now, it’s a matter of playing with the data and seeing if the design and the chart elements convey the story. I’ll continue that work tomorrow.