This week’s non-technical training was actually a mock technical interview. This is one of those areas that I was the most nervouse about. I wasn’t sure what to expect, and even though I’ve participated in this, I’m still not sure if I’m fully prepared. I was expecting a much more challenging interview. I expected to be thrown into the middle of a problem and expected to make progress toward a solution. This was a demonstration and part conversation about my skills and knowlege. I learned though that I definitely need to have more confidence in what I’ve learned through Rockit.

I’ve learned so much in the past 12 weeks that it’s almost hard to believe. I’ve learned how to write up a page with HTML, dress it up with CSS and Sass, account for user interactions with JavaScript and jQuery, make it dynamically created with PHP, and connect and use a MySQL database. In my individual and group projects, I’ve learned how to use a variety of other libraries and components specific to the project.

I think my biggest challenge is that I doubt myself when I’m asked to demonstrate my skills. I guess part of me feels like I should know the exact syntax and that I should be able to write everything correctly. I think the pressure of interviews makes me acutely aware of the fact that others are seeing my code and judging it. I like the ability to double check my syntax by testing my code and referencing documentation if I am doubting myself. I worry that if I do that during an interview, then they’d think that I don’t know what I’m doing. One thing I could start doing is keeping track of what I am looking up as I’m working on projects as well as common syntactical errors I make. Becoming conscious of these will help me feel more confident about my work during the real technical interviews.