The interview at Makers

There isn’t much out there about the interview at Makers Academy. I guess part of the reason is that the surprise element is important. Seeing how you deal with the unknown matters just as much as making sure you’ve done the work.

So you see, I can’t tell you specifically what happens during the interview. Makers Academy is agile and things change quickly, you interview will probably be very different from mine. But I can tell you about my own experience so here it goes.

I was pretty nervous. I’ve never really coded in front of someone else. I really didn’t want to write terrible code and be laughed out the room… My brain cells were starting to shut down…

Cant …solve things… with my brains.. by which I mean coding..

I think the worst thing that can happen, apart from not working through the required material, is to let yourself be flooded with stress.

If that happens to you often just repeat after me – I’m GOOD at emotion and you’re going to eventually believe it!

So.. very… good

As I was walking down Commercial Street on the way to the Makers Office, I remembered something I read in some wellbeing book – turn everything into a learning experience. Not just the good stuff like a great lecture or an exciting book.

A boring meeting, a traffic jam, a colleague being rude. You can always learn something. So I tried to put the “I don’t wanna make a giant fool of myself” feeling aside and rang the buzzer.

The interview stage consisted of a few questions, a few logic games, and some programming exercises. But unlike school where you get a task, solve it, get the points and then say “Yay, time to forget it all now“, at Makers things build on each other. You can’t just forget what you’ve learned and move on, you have to get better at it.

And this is clear even during the interview, where Jordan refactored my code in the end, explaining how he’s done it and why. He turned my tangled working mess into a coherent flow of readable short methods that work together to make something beautiful and complex. Damn.. >.<

Immediately the embarrassment came flooding back.

But the funny thing is nobody can really tell what’s going on inside your mind. And all those worries and thoughts are all simply irrelevant.

So just have fun with things. In the end I actually enjoyed my interview. It was fun seeing something crude turn into something pretty damn awesome. And the way it was done was definitely enlightening.

It made me want to be better, and showed me why I decided to go to Makers in the first place – to learn to make awesome things. There’s a certain amount of perfectionism that is needed for this. But not too much – or you’ll quickly find that learning never ends…

So here are some of the things that I’ve learned from the interview that apply to coding in general:

• “Don’t mistake the forest for the trees” – says Jordan:) – don’t get caught up in the details, avoid overcomplicating and overengineering things.
• Don’t be afraid of breaking things, use the error messages to find out not only what you’re doing wrong, but also what you should do next. Error massages, are your friend!
• It’s ok to not be perfect – which follows from the previous point – don’t get caught up in this error or that error, on how much you should’ve done and what you should know by now, concentrate on a steady improvement and results will follow
• Be clear on why you’re doing something – think about the task and the different logical ways to solve it, then try and apply code to it. One of the things Jordan pointed out was that I was forcing my limited code knowledge into a solution, rather than thinking about the problem first and then finding a solution. This sounds easier than it is, but keep trying!
• Keep things simple. Even if your code works fine, break it down into small reusable functions
• Listen, listen, listen – even when you are stressed and anxious, you’ll pick up a lot of hints that are not only useful during the interview, but also for coding in general
• Also cmd+B in sublime text, use it, it’s awesome