Interviews, GitHub and My Crash Course to CS

Last week I had the opportunity interview for a Technology Development Program. The program is a two year technology fast track that exposes you to multiple projects ranging from data engineering to cyber security to software development. It also allows you the opportunity to change locations during the two years.

 

 

 

The interview itself was kinda a big deal. They flew me down. Put me up in a hotel. Gave me a private driver. Fed me. It was pretty sweet. The problem was…. I was considerably unqualified for the position. And terrified about that fact. As an industrial engineer I have very limited formal training in computer programming, but by participating in the co-op program/internships, I do have a considerable amount of experience in database management. However, this was just a small portion of the technology program. I knew there would be a case study portion of the interview, so I had been prepping for that aspect. However, it wasn’t until Thursday afternoon (4 days before the interview) that I found out I would have to code in the interview. The interviewer would be asking me coding questions and I would have to hand write code. Needless to say, I panicked, and began trying to squeeze a four year computer science degree into four days.

 

In the process, I found an amazing resource. Similar to Khan Academy, Codecademy is an interactive program that teaches you different programming languages, for FREE. For interview prep, I finished the Python programming lessons in what I assume is a world record. This was not the first time I’ve taught myself a language, however, this was the best resource I have found. They have multiple CSS and HTML courses that I highly recommend. The classes offer instant feedback and do not let you move on in the lesson until you answer correctly.  This ensures you have a genuine understanding of the material provided.

If you are curious about how the interview went, see image below. Apparently you can’t actually learn everything about computer science in 4 days. However, the experience was awesome. I had the opportunity to talk to a few guys currently in the Technology Development Program at lunch. My contribution to the conversation… I asked them what they used for version control. They responded GitHub. And then I got to talk about how I have used GitHub! And they seemed genuinely impressed. So shout out to this class for being relevant in the real world and giving me conversation points.