Diddly little stuff

Progress:

This is almost embarassing. So I had an interview with a tech company a few weeks ago for a QA dev lead position. And I was asked to solve some coding problems.

I can't say I was suprised.

But I choked. Boofed. Froze.

On a really silly little problem.

Thinking back on it, I first thought (let's extend the martial arts analogy here...) "Geez...I'm not even a white belt! I'm a fraud! A phony! I'm a lousy pretender!"

Then I gave myself a few firm slaps across the face, told myself to pull it together, and most of all stop talking to myself in the bathroom mirror.

I'm not a white belt. I _did_ solve the problems, but it was certianly not wizardly. It was rusty and painful. Reminded me of how awkward and (somewhat) embarrasing it was after a 4 month haitus from the dojo. The knowledge was still there but the moves came...slowly.

Cut to friday.

What did I finally start doing to break the freeze? Coding a real solution to the problem given me in the interview. Exercising those algorithmic parts of my brain that were either atrophied, or never developed. And it felt surprisingly good.

So I'm wondering if maybe it wouldn't hurt to pull out those old college texts and, instead of working to get design patterns down, reimpliment those old bubblesort/quicksort routines. B-trees. Linked lists. Basic data structures & manipulation. Get familar with the language doing something that's small, quick, and I can see success in a relatively short amount of time.

It's a thought.