The Beginning of a Big Week
Today was the start of a week that could mold my path forward, or not. I have 3 interviews this week, one already in the books this afternoon. I go back to work on Wednesday. I now have 2 different take-home assignments that accompany interviews, both of which are proving to be incredibly complex. Tomorrow, I go back to the doctor to find out if I will be cleared to go back to work the following day, which I should be, barring anything out of the ordinary. All of a sudden, I'm going from having nearly 4 weeks off to work on my web development journey, to going back to the daily grind while getting into the swing of things with the interview process. It's going to be a challenge, but I love a good challenge.
I've gotten about 32% into Colt Steele and Stephen Grider's The New Modern JavaScript Bootcamp, and I've really started to learn some awesome concepts in the last couple of sections. Most of the early material in this course was fundamental review for me, but now we're getting into some uncharted territory. In the last 2 sections, we've started covering DOM manipulation, which is some truly awesome stuff. Typically, when studying JavaScript, it can become rather abstract, and I've found sometimes it's difficult to relate it back to the end goal of creating websites. DOM manipulation deals with taking JavaScript code and altering the state of a website, so it's much easier to see the effect of the code being written. In other words, instead of writing mathematical algorithms in JavaScript that have no real purpose within a website, the JavaScript being written is changing the actual website directly. Also, the authors of this course added about 6 more hours to this course that were supposed to be released when the course was initially released, but they accidentally left it out. That brings the total length of the course up to 48.5 hours. My plan was to finish this course before I started Codesmith's CSPrep next Monday, but there is no way that's going to happen.
As I stated in the beginning of this entry, I had my 1st of 3 interviews of the week earlier today. This was my first technical interview. I had no idea it was going to be a technical interview, but it wouldn't have made a difference, either way. In my opinion, I bombed it. I think he probably asked about 10 or so questions, of which I felt I had really decent answers for about 60 or 70% of them. The rest of them, I either answered really poorly or had no answer at all. The first question he asked was, "If I could change one thing about JavaScript, what would it be?" I thought this was a great question and, if given some time to answer, I may have said something about JavaScript being weakly typed and the issues that can cause, or something about scoping being so easily confused. But, given the pressure, I clammed up and literally couldn't come up with an answer at all. I also got tricked up when he asked me about the difference between block, inline-block, and inline. While I've used all of those at some point or another, it's not something I've memorized and typically would look up what to do before doing anything. I thought I had a really succinct answer to a question about the difference between == and ===, but that was about the highlight of it. At the end, he asked if I would be willing to do a take-home assignment, which I said I would. He didn't sound so confident in my abilities, though, and I don't think I landed this one. Regardless, I need to re-group and get ready for another one tomorrow, which also has a take-home assignment component, which is particularly difficult.
Until tomorrow!
