Hack Reactor Interview

Finished my Hack Reactor interview yesterday. It was definitely one of the more challenging interviews so far. Prior to the interview I was studying a list of reference materials given to me.

1. Codecademy Javascript track – don’t worry about the jQuery or Web Fundamentals tracks
2. JavaScript Koans
3. Eloquent Javascript (Second Edition), Chapters 1-5
4. “Understand JS Callback Functions and Use Them”
5. Understand JS Closures with Ease”

I was feeling kind of nervous because although I went through the material, I knew that reading was different than actually doing. I didn’t manage to finish all the practice problems in Chapter 5 of Eloquent Javascript. In fact, I was ready to reschedule the interview but decided against it when I found this article. It gave me a little more confidence so I just went ahead with it anyways.

Several other blogs which I found to be helpful reads for people wondering about the interview are as follows:

1. RebootJeff
2. thejust.in
3. arturmeyster
4. seetravisblog

I managed to calm my nerves a little by having a 10 minute meditation session beforehand. To me, the interview got serious pretty quickly. I was asked to confirm that I understood their policy for missing classes, and that if I missed more than 3 days I would be kicked out. I was also asked if I am legally allowed to work in the states, as well as if I require any funding from their partners. Next, I was asked to talk a little about my background, my interest in coding and my experiences with coding so far.

After that we jumped into the technical portion of the interview. It started off pretty mellow, and tested me on my knowledge of defining arrays, objects, accessing elements within the array and objects, and writing basic functions. Next we moved on to writing some callback functions, and then writing some code which implemented callback functions. I felt that I could have done better, but I made sure to speak out loud 90% of the time during the interview. I got the notion that that was an important factor from reading other blogs.

Overall, it was a pretty fun interview… now I just wait for the big news!