Let’s start with some numbers: I officially graduated from the Flatiron School Part-Time Online Software Engineering Program on January 29. I started sending out applications on February 12. I received my first offer letter on March 12, and my second offer letter on March 17. I embarked on my job search journey having heard from several successful software engineers that it takes an average of three months to land your first programming job. Every time I thought about this it made me cringe, so I was totally determined to distill the job search period down as much as possible.
I’ve been on the job interview train for the past 2.5 weeks, and as such have been asked hundreds of questions, some of which I struggled to answer well. Even when you think you know something intimately because you’ve spent hundreds of hours working closely with it, sometimes conveying your knowlege and understanding succinctly is frustratingly difficult. Let’s dive into some (these are JS-specific).
Let’s begin by defining higher-order functions. Higher-order functions are functions that operate on other functions, either by taking them as arguments or by returning them (Ref). The JavaScript Array Sort method is one such function. arr.sort() takes an argument of a named or anonymous function (i.e., a callback) called a compare function. arr.sort() will pass two elements of the array at a time to the compare function, which will return a numerical value based on how the elements compare to one another. A negative return value means the first element is lesser than the second; a positive return value means the first is greater than the second, and a return value of zero means the two elements are equal. Once the sorting is complete, arr.sort() will return a new, sorted copy of the original array.
In my most recent project, which happens to be my final portfolio project for the Flatiron School Software Engineering Program, I had the pleasure of building a React-Redux frontend backed by a Rails API. I decided to take a stab at building a rough draft of what could eventually become my portfolio website. Over the course of the last section of the curriculum, I found myself struggling to grasp the big picture of React, and how and why the Redux pattern works. Building this project helped me wrap my head around these tools in a way I could not have gotten from anything else.
For my Single Page Application JavaScript and Rails project, I applied the same domain model used in both my Sinatra and Rails projects. In a nutshell (or a coffee bean…if you will), a user can post about cups of coffee they sip, describing the type of coffee beans used to brew the cup, the brew method itself, the roaster that produced or roasted the coffee, and finally the user rates their cup on a scale of 1-5. Given that User, Cup, Coffee, Roaster, and Rating are all model classes associated with one another in various ways, my backend is somewhat complex, but I kept my JS frontend pretty simple. A user may sign up, post cups, and view other users’ cups, all in a fast, responsive, JS-powered web page.