Flood fill algorithm small talk

April 19, 2017

Introduction

Flood fill algorithm is a term Julia learned through wiki article reading in 2017. Julia learned the algorithm through various situations and found out that it is very important to follow the structure to practice. The structure she follows starting less than 1 month is to start from one small example, work through the example. If Julia has 30 minutes to work on the algorithm, she will spend first 10 minutes to work on a small example, go over the problem and think out loud with ideas to solve the problem, write pseudo code, and walk through some test cases. To show the intelligence, Julia will write down something to help herself track the progress. And next 10 minutes to write the code, and 10 minutes for potential issues.

As showed in the following transcript, Julia went through the sample test case, and then counted one by one island and marked them using A, B, C, D, E, F. And then she went over the detail in 10 minutes to write and communicate ideas through her writing. She likes to write and reminds her to go through everything in her preparation to a perfect bug-free coding stage.

Good conversation is like this, Julia said that there is 5 of islands, the peer said that it is six. So Julia just marked one by one using A to E, and then she found F at last moment. It is called cognitive ability, both of players know each other through counting activities. Good warmup. Julia did very well on this, showed that she could collaborate very well, adapt to uncertainty and learn.

Flood fill algorithm 

Here is the 30 minutes transcript in mocking experience.


Julia tried to make the code more clear as possible, and she should push the code to the visit function.

Code review after the practice, fix grammar errors, code is here.

Make the code less verbose, and short. Here is the code to add extract a visit function.

Here is the progress report, the 30 minutes transcript has been worked on to fix grammar errors first, the compiled C# code is optimized to add extract visit function next.

Actionable Item

Read the article one more time, Google hire, write down notes here:


General cognitive ability - the capacity to learn, the combination of raw intelligence

Argument 2:
A diligent interviewer will probe deeply to assess the veracity and thought process - how to do it?

Argument 3:
People who score high on conscientiousness “work to completion”—meaning they don’t stop until a job is done rather than quitting at good enough—and are more likely to feel responsibility for their teams and the environment around them.