So, I finished coding boot camp….now what?

I finally did it. It was a long hard road getting through boot camp while working. But! I did it. It was a huge accomplishment and I am glad I signed up and stayed the course.

Post boot camp…that brought on a bit of anxiety. Now I have to find a job. In order to find a job, that means technical interviews. Technical interviews scare the bejeebus out of me. I did get to put that off a bit.

My program comes with career coaching. Which means career prep for roughly sixty days after graduation. Learning how to interview for cultural and technical interviews. I found the time commitment of this to be pretty significant in addition to the rest of my life and so coding took a bit of a back seat while I worked on rewiring those parts of my brain.

I typically do well in cultural interviews. I am just myself and answer questions honestly and don’t try to think too hard on what an interviewer wants to hear. I am a hard worker, have strong ethics, able to admit when I am wrong or make a mistake…overall, I feel like I am a pretty good hire for a team.

Then came the mock technical interview. My brain just froze up. Like solid. It felt like there were actual gears in there and they just came to a screeching halt and were not moving. I have done a lot of reading, practicing, etc to try and overcome the anxiety of these interviews. Imposter syndrome just kept derailing my efforts. After lots of brainstorming and even more trial and error, I finally found something that worked to help reduce the panic.

I decided to crash course material that I already knew I knew and start at the beginning. I am doing this in a very quick manner with a couple of different courses. As a rough idea on my first attempt at this, I am running through what was the first three 8 week modules of boot camp in about two weeks. Being able to speed through the learning and actually knowing what is going on has been a pretty decent boost.

While I understand none of this is new, it is giving me a bit of a refresher on terminology which in turn will allow me to have more confidence in what I am talking about. There were also parts of the curriculum that I didn’t fully grasp the first time around, so this is also giving me a much deeper understanding than what I had (and felt like I forgot). Then, just for fun, I started creating a cheat sheet like I did before each of my assessments during boot camp. Being able to read through the cheat sheets the day before an assessment really calmed my nerves and reminded me that I do remember and I do know what to do. The thought is these cheat sheets will function the same prior to tech interviews.

Once I get through my refresher/crash course for Ruby/Ruby on Rails, I will be creating a handful of projects from start to finish. My plan is to add portions of my cheat sheets and learning from the refresher and projects in blogs each week. Maybe all of my ramblings will be useful to someone else who struggles with imposter syndrome, anxiety, and whatever else.

Here is my first cheat sheet for Ruby:

Miscellaneous notes:

• You don’t need a compiler to write/run Ruby
• Ruby is object-oriented
• puts vs print — print will just jam everything all into one line where puts (“put string”) will start each puts on a new line
• syntax for string interpolation: #{variable_here}
• comments — use #, multi line comments can start with “=begin” on the first line, multiple comment lines, final line is “=end”
• methods are chainable

Variables

• do not need to be initialized as in some other languages (such as JavaScript where a variable is declared with let/const/var). Ex: name = “Mikel”
• naming convention for local variables — they should be in snake_case with all lower case letters

Math (yes, most of these are obvious, but “modulo” is one that I always forget the name of and had to do in a written assessment recently and couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was)

• Addition (+)
• Subtraction (-)
• Multiplication (*)
• Division (/)
• Exponentiation (**) — example: 2**3 is the same as 2 * 2 * 2
• Modulo (%) — returns the remainder of division. For example: 30 % 7 is 2 (7 goes into 30 four times with a remainder of 2)

Again, I understand this type of cheat sheet is incredibly simple, but it helps give me that little boost I need to jumpstart my brain when it is overly anxious. Reading through this type of cheat sheet starts the gears going. Once they are started, the rest falls into place and code starts swimming in my head again.