Motivating and practicing for interviews

This month has been full of emotions. Fear, frustration, motivation, fun and more. During this time, becoming a software developer has felt very close but at the same time I feel that the road is still long to achieve it. This is the reason for the set of emotions that I have felt during this month.

The two most relevant things that I learned during this new phase of my process as a software developer were about stress management and how to pass an interview.

At the beginning of the month, I learned about two types of stress: distress and eustress. This topic helped me a lot to understand that feeling stressed is not bad, as long as this stress is not rational.

Distress is when you are worried or distressed by things that you cannot control that do not depend on you. Therefore, this type of stress only consumes your energy. For example, getting stressed out by traffic or because the world is going to end.

Eustress is a type of stress that gives your life purposes and challenges. It is the feeling nervous about speaking in public, the discomfort you feel when learning something new, the thought that you should learn a new language. This type of stress makes us challenge ourselves to progress and to expand our comfort zone. For example, the first week of the month I had an English session (which would be similar to a job interview), which put pressure on me to study and prepare for that occasion. In the end it was not as bad as sometimes you imagine it would be, and the most important thing is that this helps you feel more comfortable the next time the same happens.

In short, it is setting yourself challenges that make you uncomfortable and make you leave your comfort zone and that consequently become part of your comfort zone.

About the interviews, I found a technique to prepare for the coding interviews. What I did was create an account on Pramp and use it to have a couple of mock interviews that are about how you solve a problem and must interview your partner too.

Before Pramp, I watched an algorithm class to learn how to solve another problem and after that I tried to solve exercises in Leetcode and HarckerRank about the topic.

There is no trick here. Practice makes a master. Practice, practice, and practice, and eventually you will achieve your goal (in this case, pass the interview).