I’m finally “finished” with my interactive resume! What that really means is that there’s still more work to be done, but it’s at least presentable so I can move to the next steps of my job search. You can check it out here, remember, it’s a work in progress!

I’ve just been cranking out work and progress for the interactive resume the last couple days. On Thursday, I actually got to visit a SE at the Google campus and it was quite the experience. My motivation to get into Google has definitely been reignited, and despite where I may go next, or what path I’ll take, I ultimately want to end up at Google. The caliber of the SE that I talked to that day was inspirational. I asked him what was one of the best parts about working at Google so far and his answer really impressed me: “Everyone’s smarter than me.” That’s simply astounding. What that means to me is there’s an abundance of growth and learning. He’s only been at Google for a year, and he entered immediately after he graduated undergrad so that’s saying something.

Alongside all my projects that I’ll be doing, and applying that I’m trying to keep up with, I also need to study more algorithms and data structures. I’m actually REALLY excited to continue studying these topics. It’s not that they come easy to me, it’s that I find that conceptually, they’re not incredibly difficult to learn. They are however, a challenge to implement, and then implement in different ways, that’s what’s really fun about learning algorithms and data structures.

I also have an additional plan I’d like to implement, and that really involves structuring my day, which I’ll go into in a second. The additional plan that I’d like to implement is Google Interview University, that was put together by John Washam, now renamed to Coding Interview University. I want to work towards really grinding this curriculum out as I continue to work on projects. So here’s the breakdown of how each day should go:

Note before I break down each day: I want to slowly get back into my 5am morning habits with working out since I’ve really neglected my health and fitness the last 2-3 months since failing A03. When I get back into it, 5am-9am is me time. During this time I’ll workout, journal, read non-coding or coding related personal development and mentally prepare myself for the day.

Daily:

9am – 12pm: HiR Shift (Most likely every day)

12pm-2pm: Working out and Lunch

2pm – 5pm: Apply to 10-25 companies. Mock interivews. Coding challenges (Toy problems, Algo/DT’s, build-something, etc.).

5pm-8pm: Working from the Coding Interview University. Crank out problems from CTCI, Elements of Programming Interviews, and Programming Interviews Exposed.

8pm-10pm: Projects!

10pm-11pm: Wind down. Leisure reading, preferably non-coding.

Now there’s usually one or two days that would make me deviate from the above schedule.

Tuesday:

12pm-6pm: Graduate Job Seeker Program. This usually includes mock interviewing, potentially additional flex projects. If i’m not working on flex projects, which will be expected while I’m an HiR, I’ll be working on my projects to polish up my resume.

6pm-9pm: This block of time on Tuesdays will serve as my 2pm-5pm on other days, which means job application related activities.

9pm-10pm: Personal projects or a problem or two from CTCI.

10pm-11pm: Wind down.

There will also be a couple additional days where I’m scheduled for HiR shifts in the afternoon, my schedule will probably adjust accordingly, in which case, projects or mock interviewing will take a back seat in lieu of my shifts and I would shift all my other activities around. My overall priority at the current moment is to apply to jobs, polish up on projects and study algorithms and data structures.

As for projects, I have a couple in mind that I would like to do, and I’ll summarize it here:

Interactive Resume: I’ll be addressing the future fixes that I stated on the github readme for the project found here. But to quickly summarize, I want to improve the movement system to include scrollwheel and trackpad scrolling, which isn’t easy, I think I have to rework the entire movement system. Fix bugs in regards to screen resolution. Create a contact modal with relevant social media links.

Dapper.Life: Fix infinite scrolling, which broke when the project was deployed to Heroku. Add ability to upload photos and profile photos (more experience with AWS. I’m super excited for this.). Add photo modals for viewing photo details separately. I’ve considered refactoring or starting the project from scratch. I also want to work on migrating my project over to RailsLite and ActiveRecordLite when I’m done with the project.

Dapper.Life Mobile: Learn React Native and migrate Dapper.Life over to mobile, since it makes a lot more sense to do so.

RailsLite: Custom framework modeled after Rails. I want to roll Dapper.Life and Dapper.Life Mobile on my version of RailsLite. It’ll definitely help deepen my understanding Rails. It’ll also help me elucidate all of the “Rails Magic.”

ActiveRecordLite: This would occur in conjunction with RailsLite.

jQueryLite: This would optimize run time on my interactive resume once this project is completed and is used in my interactive resume project as opposed to the actual jQuery library.

Additional projects: I want to learn more about machine learning. I think it’s a fascinating topic. I also want to learn Python in addition to further solidifying my  fundamentals in Ruby and JavaScript. In regards to Python, I’d like to build a scalable app using Python and one of Python’s many frameworks on the backend. I’d like to use Firebase in this project as well, and maybe explore using Google Cloud for storage, as opposed to AWS.

I think that’s pretty much it for now. I say ‘that’s pretty much it’ as if I have a short grocery list, but in reality, this list is daunting as heck. Obviously, with only 2 hours or so a day to touch on the above projects list, progress is going to be pretty slow, but it gives me a reason to look forward to coding every day, as if expanding my knowledge on algos and dt’s isn’t reason enough. That’s pretty much it! I’ll try to keep you guys up to date with my progress daily. I’ll hopefully switch gears to more technical writing by blogging about various algorithms and data structures that I’ve learned from the day. It’d definitely help solidify my understanding of the materials.

Thanks for reading! I’ll talk to you guys next time =D