A cheerful heart is good medicine

May 27, 2017

Introduction 

Proverbs 17:22, Julia's favorite verse. "A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones". Every time Julia is too busy to work on something, she starts to check whether she has the feeling of a cheerful heart, specially she likes to stay late past midnight to work on a contest algorithm. She likes to share a story of a cheerful heart, and ends her weekend with some good story.

The mock experience is related to people skills and Julia started to learn how to make most from it. She has limited resource and limited budget to try new things. She chose free mock experience, she never tried any paid mock experience, but she did feel that she has to make mock experience very good learning activities.

Always have a cheerful heart on your own or peer's mistakes, they are the best friends of algorithm problem solvers. Coding is a crafting skills, talk about mistakes, journal the transcript, and then get back to compete again.

4 Sum

People with top talent to attend mock usually are very young and just start his/ her career, and one time Julia felt that the hints were too strong in the first 5 minutes, she had to take the hint given by peer. The algorithm is 4 sum, Leetcode 18. Second time she was mocked again using similar algorithm like 4 sum, she decided to work on practice Leetcode 4 sum. Here is her practice C# code. Her second mock code is here.

Edit Distance

Julia learned so many lessons from her own mistakes. She could not figure out dynamic programming Edit Distance in her first round mock in 2017. Overall, she almost failed at least 20% - 30% in her first round.

Julia wrote a bug on spiral matrix first as an interviewee, and then she interviewed some one the spiral matrix. She observed carefully the peer's performance, she had more confident to make the code perfect later on.

Every peer get stumbles in mock experience, she reminds herself not long ago she had same experience. Julia felt so connected through mock experience.

She suddenly found out that she never met and talked to so many engineers in the world, but she did in one weekend. As a programmer, she felt a little proud of learning to review peer's code and also recommend a book "The Art of Readable Code".

Last long weekend, she managed to finish 11 mock experience. So she almost finished her second round. The fact is that second round is learning round. Test your own code, not using compiler, use your own whiteboard techniques.

Reverse string 

The fact is that she met strong peers who shared her importance to learn and write good clean code, specially recursive, DFS, and also the peer still practices. The meeting is short but she feels that the study group formed through the discussion is also very rewarding experience, she would be a nice algorithm teacher one day if she continues.

It is fun to play with a peer. One day, Julia  met a peer again and she was too busy to follow the peer's idea to solve the problem, but she knew that the peer was working hard and the idea needs to be tuned. Julia likes to gain some skills to be a professional interviewer one day, so she learned quickly to say sorry, not followed closely with the ideas in the code. Good heart leads to a new world, the peer told her that there is something new and different, she was well received with a tip.

"Every player knows how to play tennis". That is the famous tennis professional player's quote. Only those survive with strong mind set, and determination, and the hard work training, practice.

Related to tennis sports, Julia learns to treat peers equally and be supportive in mock experiences.

Julia missed how a professional mock experience will look like. She booked one mock and surprisingly she got one in less than one week.

Study and talk 

Julia wrote a blog about the study "Does mock make difference", and then she moved herself to next stage in her practice, know a professional interviewer with thousand experience, and also learn to mark herself with a mark, May 27, 2017, she got a mark which is called passing the bar - 2.5. 

Good heart leads to a new world. Julia likes to show people that she has determination to gain skills in algorithm and data structure, and is working hard on the improvement. Still exploring...

Julia understood that those contest practice with medium levels are very helpful, she prepared herself, she felt that the depth first search, recursive function call is so important to learn.

She forgets to write a base case in DFS algorithm, still she needs to the hint to go over the test case and then find out that she lets the loop forever because of that.