Your Personal Brand (Week 16 @ Encora Academy)

Let’s rewind a little bit. Three months ago, I just started my journey in the Encora/Nearsoft academy program, which consists of five phases.

• Reset phase
• Build something from scratch
• Open Source
• Your personal brand
• Get a job

Every time a new phase begins, there’s a feeling of excitement and suspense about what’s about to happen, and this time was no exception…

This phase is about to get ready for a coding interview (building your personal brand). With a lot of coding exercises, readings about what to expect in one of these interviews, and review as much as you can about computer science.

As this phase started on Tuesday, from that day I focused on following a learning path about core concepts in CS, also about topics that I knew I had to study more from an evaluation interview that I had a week ago.

This week I understood the difference between unit and integration testing, which basically is that, on one hand, you test by units (short functions handling specific problems) and, on the other hand, you test several units working as a group.

I finished a course about OOP and algorithms, where I did exercises and reviewed the big O notation. I saw the difference between the kinds of algorithm complexity. These are the basic big O notation functions:

• Constant: O(1)
• Logarithmic: O(log n)
• Linear: O(n)
• Quadratic: O(n^2)
• Polynomial: O(n^c)
• Exponential: O(c^n)

Understand how important is this topic helped me a lot when I was doing some hacker rank problems. We need to do the HR Interview Preparation Kit, which consists of 69 coding challenges.

In some of these challenges, I tested the case shown in the examples and got it right on my computer, but when I tested it on the HR website I frequently got a time-out problem. So, I had to rethink my solution and try to do it more efficiently, reducing my algorithm complexity.

Frequently, what fixed my solutions was to use better data structures or reducing unnecessary loops.

Conclusion

Sometimes when you’re attracted to learn something new is because you see the cool things that you can achieve with that knowledge, let’s say if you want to know how to skate, maybe it’s because you saw someone jumping stairs and sliding in a handrail, but no one starts doing that, and it’s important to learn the basic stuff before jumping into the hard stuff.

In CS is the same, if you want to solve complex problems or those google code challenges you have to make sure that you understand the core concepts.