Mock interview weekday 10:00 PM

Dec. 9, 2017

Introduction

It is the question a young graduate student asked me in mock interview recently, what is my motivation to practice mock interview? Am I preparing for interview or just for training and improving skills.

My story

I did write a blog on this topic before. It was more than four months ago. The link is here. The topic is to do your current job well. We have to learn how to serve the current employer very well. A lot of uncertain things will happen in the job, we have no control at all. But we can choose to do thing easy to be controllable, keep practice mock interview, keep meeting highly talented programmers, keep practice those thirty algorithms again and again on mock platform, learn one thing a time, practice one algorithm a time, learn from one peer at a time.

In order to get really good on one algorithm, I also ask the question on code review stack exchange to get more input from the general public.

Training is like favorite sports I like, tennis. I learn from professional tennis players, follow them on instagram every day. The top tennis professional players are very good to market themselves, educate the fans what is really a sports professional, I just learn how to do interval training from 詹詠然 Latisha Chan , problem solving skills. My favorite players are Alize Cornet, Elena Vesnina, 詹詠然 Latisha Chan.

We know that the algorithm and data structure plays so important role as a software programmer. We also know how the technology makes our life so enjoyable and so rich. We actually change the world through our daily work as software programmer. We have to train ourselves like professional tennis sports players do. To expedite daily problem solving, write highly self-documented code, and keep updated with latest trends in education, technology and hottest market - competitive career and job search, one of training I choose to do is to practice mock interview daily at 10:00 PM. Keep working on crafting skills, communication skills, whiteboard skills, the rest will come naturally.

New story

Through those hundred mock interviews, I learn to work on the same mock interview algorithm again and again. I actually train myself to learn various things, coding style, testing, and also new features in language, a new language, how to help and communicate, experience tough time, deal with tough situation. I document all the experience through coding blogs.

I used to write so complicated code, and worry about bugs. Every time I make code change I worry about all kinds of issues. One time I remembered that I may mess up existing code in the same function, for example, the function I have to work on is too complicated and it will take some time to rewrite and test them. Right now, I understand that it is more important to write with good coding style, good code principle instead of just making it work, I kill the code right away and start to write clean code. Zero tolerance on bad coding style, zero tolerance violation of coding principles like DRY, SRP, S.O.L.I.D., TED principle.