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Wow…after 1.5 years employed doing object-oriented programming in Java, I found myself struggling a bit the past couple days with code challenges. For those of you that aren’t aware, interviews for programmers generally involve a “code test” of some sort. These tests are designed to check your skill level at creating an algorithm to solve some form of complex problem. You can think of them like a ‘riddle’ in a way. Skill is assessed in a number of ways, accuracy of the solution being just one aspect. Simple and succinct code being another. The code challenges, however, are generally short self-contained problems that may test your mathematical prowess but have next to nothing to do with actual web development. Despite this fact, code challenges are routinely used and I’d better be ready.
As such, I logged in on HackerRank, one of the many sites which purport to test your skill level. Unfortunately, while I’d been spending all my work time slinging objects in and out of databases, creating, updating, listing, transforming and deleting them as well, I haven’t had much need to practice using the many and varied methods built into Ruby and Java. I’ve been mainly creating my own methods to deal with my employer’s unique datasets. As a result, I am out of practice. Perhaps it would have been a good idea to start each day with a code challenge just to stay on top of it. I think that might not be a bad idea from here on out. In the meantime, it’ll be a bit of a slog as I get back up to speed. Fortunately, my Google-Fu is pretty good so I can find an answer on the net without much delay. What I’m unhappy about, however, is that I’ve let it eclipse what I need to do on my passion project. Starting tomorrow, I’ll have to enforce a hard limit on how much time I spend doing algorithms and get the real work done.
Ciao for now!
Brendan