career-journal-mod3week4.md

1. Prepare for Job Shadow: AEIOU

• Activities: what questions do you have about the activities that a software developer does on a daily basis?

  • What is their schedule like?
  • How much time do you spend in meetings vs work time?
  • Are there activities that a team does together?

• Environment: what questions do you have about the overall environment and culture of this workplace?

  • How is working remotely from working in an office?
  • What type of communication is use within the team?
  • How does a team brainstorm ideas (wifeframing)?

• Interactions: what questions do you have about the team at this company? What do you hope to see in your interactions during the shadow?

  • Does this team offer mentorship?
  • What type of style does the team do? Pair/Conquer & Divide?
  • How is feedback solicitied and how are the responses handled?
  • I hope to see what it is in a job for a dev.

• Objects: what questions do you have about the code or the product?

  • What is your customer base?
  • What language does the code use?
  • What framework does the code use?

• Users: what questions do you have about how the company interacts with their users?

  • How does it track the user interaction?
  • What kind of accessibility is built for specific user interactions if any?
  • What type of reserach goes into user interaction?

2. After the Job Shadow, reflect on the same questions; what are your takeaways from the shadow?

• Activities: what was engaging to the person/people you shadowed?

  • How they came from a bootcamp background (Turing) and how this was their first job out of Turing and he stayed there.

• Environment: what did you notice about how they talked about the culture and environment of this company?

  • I noticed that it was very warm and welcoming and it talks a lot if my job shadow person stayed at the company even though it was his first job. I also notice that even though they don't have a mentorship program official there are people willing to mentor a junior dev.

• Interactions: what did you notice about your interactions with this person/people?

  • I was nervous and intmidated, but after a while it was relaxing to talk to them and ask questions. They eased the nerves of a new junior developer.

• Objects: what did you learn about their approach to code and/or product development?

  • Since he has been at the company for a couple of years I learned that code always changes and he showed how a code he written in the past needed to change now. It was also interesting to see that it was his code he write that needed to be changed.

• Users: what did you learn about their approach to their users?

  • He was a backend dev so we didn't talk much about their approach to users. He did mention though that companies pay them to give out coupons and using the data from a user they are more incline to send out coupons related to what the user is buying product wise.

• What are your main takeaways from the shadow? How will you use this information to help you with your job search strategy?

  • Main takeways for me is look up the interviewer if possible to learn about them.
  • Say if you don't know something and be willing to learn about it rather than giving a high level answer.
  • See both sides even though the interview is important to use it is not to the interviewer.

3. Interview Prep:

• Pick a successful project and write about it with the STAR method (What was the situation/scenario of the project? What was the task/target of the project? What action steps did you take? What were the results?):

  • Project is Rancid Tomatillos which is a paried project, where we have an api of movies and need to build an app to display the movies and the movie details.
  • Task/Target of the project is to have an app that is built with react and has accessibility, is responsive and the user is able to view the all movies as well as be directed to a different link using router to a movie detail page. It also uses cypress testing to the application.
  • Actions taking was first we wireframed everything out not only the look of the app but also seperating components and what should live in each component. We sat down and worked on everything together since we were both new react and it helped when we got stuck on a problem we would work together and research to solve the problem.
  • Results was that it was a successful application as well as worflow.

• Write about a time you failed and what you learned from that experience:

  • A time that I failed was the test part for the interview to come to Turing. What I learned was that putting in time to practice the questions helped a lot and what I take from this is that in life we will consistently fail but putting in the time and effort to practice we can become successful.

• Write about how you’ve approached working with a team using a specific example:

  • In a team before we even start on any coding I want to touch on the topic of what we want out of this project and what is everyone's expectation. I have done this with all Projects within Turing and I find that the more detailed and open one is the more everyone will be on the same page.

• What other stories will you prepare to share?

  • Personal story of why this industry?

• Do some research into your top companies’ tech stacks; what do you already know? What can you compare to your own learning? What do you need to learn more about?

  • When looking into a company tech stack what I already know is what languages they are using and compare to my own learning I can see and tell them I know these languages. What do I need to learn more about it is if there are heavily use a different language I many need to do some research and self learning before the interview so that they know I atleast have been looking into it.

• Using this interview prep resource doc, pick out at least 3 resources you will use to prepare for interviews as well as 3 behavioral questions you could practice:

• Code Wars

• Top 50 Programming Interview Questions

• Leet Code is a platform both practicing technical interview skills (there are over 1600 questions to practice!) and for helping companies identify top technical talent through sponsored events on the platform.

• What are you looking for in a company? Why would you want to work here?

• Describe a project that failed, a project you had to give up on, or a time you worked really hard on a project and it just didn’t pan out as expected. What happened? How did you make the decisions that you made?

• Explain one of the most difficult code problems you’ve had to solve, either on your own authored code, or in contributing to someone else’s.