What did you do this past week?

This past week I was incredibly busy. After coming back from Tennessee, I quickly began work on the Allocator project. My partner and I worked on the project for a couple of days, and ultimately got the implementation finished much faster than anticipated. I was invited down to San Antonio by USAA for second round interviews. I drove down there on Monday, they put the group f candidates up in a hotel room and took us to dinner that night. A tour of the USAA campus and interviews were conducted the next morning. Once I got back to Austin, I had to meet up with a group on Wednesday and Thursday to start another project that is due this coming week. I was finally able to relax after class on Friday.

What’s in your way?

Currently nothing feels in my way. Getting invited to the second round of interviews for USAA really gave me a confidence boost for the future. There are definitely still skills that I need to improve on regarding problem solving and design questions, but at least I know that my interview skills aren’t as bad as I felt that they were.

What will you do next week?

This next week I have a phone interview with a company here in Austin called SailPoint. I haven’t researched them too much yet, so I plan to do that early in the week. I expect the next project for this course to be release, so I will also be trying to find a partner and hopefully get started on it. I will also be attending the guest lecture on Monday night.

What’s my experience of the class?

I really enjoy this class. I leave lecture everyday feeling like I either learned something new, or really solidified my understanding of a topic. Downing teaches things about programming languages that are pretty specific, and something that the average programmer might not know if they have never looked into it themselves. For example, the fact that Vector uses an Allocator under the hood. I personally didn’t know this when he taught it, but now that I think about it makes so much sense that way. This class has also motivated me to explore the exact implementations of other data structures and how to use them to maximize efficiency.

What’s my pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

My tip of the week is you lose what you don’t use in terms of knowledge. One of the interview questions I was faced with this week was a simple word problem where you had to set up a system of equations to solve it. Well, I hadn’t actually used systems of equations in years, and subsequently I forgot that I could use that technique to solve the problem. I still got the problem right, but my solving process could have been a lot better. Basically, you should always try to keep your brain sharp by doing some practice word problems and logic puzzles, that way you don’t lose the things that you learn.