4h Last night I was reading a quote that someone received from a TripleByte tech interviewer. The general quote was: focus on the fundamentals as much as possible. If you know how to quickly sort an array it will always work. If you focus on the new hot thing then that will probably be out of fashion in a few months / years and you will have to learn even faster in order to keep up. It’s a lot easier to mentally transfer fundamentals across different languages than it is to move frameworks.

I took this as a light to guide my studies by. I’m not going to be super proficient in a ton of things by the time I graduate. I hope to be able to show an employer that I am able to learn, that I’ve made some interesting stuff, and that I’m excited to be a software engineer. Consequently it probably makes more sense for me to spend time learning more boring things like SQL and data structures, and algorithms vs learning apollo or sass or angular. I’m definitely going to toss some new things in there just so they know I’m interested in self-teaching beyond the classroom, but I have a new strategy to the balance.

I’ve also decided to actually put the effort in on interview prep. It’s not easy, but I have 3 months and it could easily determine a 20k (or more!?) difference in my starting salary. I need to learn a TON more about a lot of different subjects, and I need to work really hard so that the interviews allow me to show my best self and impress the employers. I think that even if I were only to get a higher level of comfort in being interviewed and challenged, this effort will be worthwhile. I bet I’ll go beyond that and end up being able to show what I’m thinking better, be less stressed with whiteboarding and technical questions, and also do better on surprise coding challenges in general. I like being tested, so all I need to do is get comfortable with the experience enough so that I can relax and be myself.

So, what did I do today? I did 8 challenges on hackerrank, I started a node web scraping project, and I watched some mongodb videos.