Lockdown release
Fresh from getting shot down at the last hurdle and taking a whole weekend of relaxing, yes a whole weekend! I was feeling in a much better mental state to tackle the oncoming week, I started off with a morning meeting with my mental health app group where we outlined the objectives the week and also to catchup what I had missed for the past 2 weeks. I must say I was impressed with what was achieved so far and the app is really starting to take shape. For this week’s assignment we generated ideas for the homepage of the app and set above implementing what we thought would be good to have. We settled on a couple of graphs to display user achievements and It was all coming together very nicely.
I also jumped back on the job hunt trail again and I can safely say I didn’t miss it at all but can’t score if you don’t shoot. On a coding front I started off with practicing some codewars before diving back into Exercism. For those who don’t know it’s a lovely website setting out some challenges you can download to your preferred IDE, I like the structure of the challenges and the overall layout and highly recommend to those learning new languages to give it a go. There’s also mentor feedback which is really great to help you improve your coding too which not that many other websites have.
There was a 24 hour tech test to complete this week which was a generous amount of time for completion as usually I believe it’s 3 hours. I must say I found it very tough but was eventually able to complete the required task and achieve the desired output with less than 2 hours remaining on the clock. I opted to do the test in Javascript to help get me up to speed quicker, the level and type of work required on the tech test is exactly the type needed to get my head back into the problem solving headspace. I will definitely be looking to do more similar types of tech tests to brush up on my skills.
Job market winding down in the lead up to Santa’s arrival, I would have hoped for a job by now but clearly I’ve been very naughty this year. On the back of last week I wanted I continue practicing my Javascript, not building programs but just testing my Javascript knowledge and skills but completing coding challenges. It’s a good idea to split your time between building new projects and completing coding challenges as you never know what exactly a tech test will involve. So knowing there another tech test to prepare for this week and not knowing how to prepare I set about learning more Javascript by using both codeSignal and Exercism. Both excellent platforms with Exercism able to provide mentor support and advice and codeSignal was the coding platform for the company so a wise decision to practice on there. I found on codeSignal the jumps in difficulty were a bit steep, but the layout of the website is kind of like a game where you accrue coins for completing challenges which you can spend on various things on the website such as unlocking tests if you needed any more motivation to code. There’s also practice interview questions on there but as I haven’t used that section I can’t give an opinion on how useful it is.
I’ve also had a break from my 2 group projects this week, not intentionally but I feel everyone else in the groups are also busy with their job hunts or various activities, in truth this has been a blessing as I have been able to focus on my own learning this week instead of contributing to projects. Juggling time for myself, 2 group projects and a job hunt has been tricky and so i’m really looking forward to having some time this holiday to relax a bit and focus on my own things.
