Hack Reactor Week 1 Recap

Last Saturday marks the last day of my first week at HR. It was a pleasant first week. We spent the first two days reviewing key concepts covered at pre-course by rewriting some recursion problems as well as underscore methods. We then started our four day sprint on class patterns and data structures. At the end of day 2, we had a self-assessment(SA) on the review material. The SA wasn't a very hard problem but was challenging to finish and pass all the tests within the one hour period allotted to us. If we could not pass the tests we can try to finish the SA within the next day. On day 3 of the week, I learned about five different class styles including functional, functional-shared, prototypal, pseudoclassical, and ES6. The sprint was relatively straightforward; we had to implement data structures such as stack and queue and write both of them in all 5 class patterns. On day 5, we started a sprint on writing different data structures such as linked lists, trees, hash tables, sets, graphs, and binary search trees. This was a tougher sprint than the previous two because we had to understand each data structure and implement the key methods to them. The week ended with a self-assessment where we have to implement another method to the tree. This SA was more challenging to me because I was unsure as to how I should approach the problem. In the end even though I solved the problem, I overcomplicated it an implement an algorithm that took double the time than the most efficient solution. All in all, week one was a great experience. I really liked the format of HR where we spend a lot of time pair programming and discovering the content for ourselves. Being a fresh graduate from college, it was definitely a transition to get used to. I enjoy being able to bounce ideas off of my partners and learn alongside people who have the same goal of being a software engineer.