I am a few days away from going into my first true technical interview. I am not sure what to expect with it, except for the duration of the skills exam is 90 minutes. It is intimidating to think I need to be on point for that long. I have gotten by so far, by a variety of coping techniques, including walking away from my computer to clear my head, when I run into a wall.
My initial chat with this company had a few technical questions and even I came away with some new knowledge in some things. It especially made it clear that I have come a long way from when I started and I still have a long way to go. I did have some React questions thrown in for a Rails position, luckily I had recently struggled with a take-home test dealing with React.
I have been going over old material in the language to get ready for this. So far, I have gone through methods that can be run on strings and arrays while trying to replicate the array methods with my own custom methods. I will be going over some Hash material in the next couple of days, along with a few hours of build and burns to get ready for this.
I am getting more nervous the closer I get to the technical interview. I learned while doing the React take-home test that I was able to complete it even though I felt overwhelmed at the start. I struggled with some stuff I had done before but had not done in a while. This gave me the confidence to answer questions about them in the following interview. This showed me that even though I had to go through that struggle, I grew in the long run and was more confident in the things I learned during that struggle.
I plan to look at this as an opportunity to grow and hone in on what I need to continue working on. If all goes well, that’s great, I am ready for the challenge and excited to start contributing as a team member. If not, I have learned some valuable skills that will have me even more prepared for the next one.
