I completed my first take home tech challenge!

This week I completed my first take home tech challenge of my job hunt. This post will likely just be some rambling as I process having done that - hopefully it is semi-coherent.

I applied for a position and got turned down - only for them to pretty quickly turn around and ask me to apply for a different position. Gotta say that felt pretty good! They indicated the next step was for me to complete a take home tech project.

I was asked to complete a simple Node.js/Express API with yup validation and some Jest tests to go along with. None of these are things I had worked with before! So I definitely had some learning to do. Obviously I know Javascript well, so thankfully I wasn't really learning an entirely new programming language. Still, I had only built API's with Ruby before.

I spent a lot of time reading tutorials and watching videos. No one tutorial used the exact set up I had, which seems to be the case very often, so I had to search around for all the puzzle pieces I needed. For the most part, learning syntax was the biggest thing. The concepts themselves were almost all pretty familiar.

I don't know that I have a particular opinion on Node.js yet - I would have to work with it on a larger project I think, but I like it well enough. I can see that it would be nice to be working with the same language in my front and backend - unlike the projects I've worked with before where I have to keep JS and Ruby both in my brain.

Jest had me stymied for a while, getting frustrated because I could tell that I was so dang close! I knew that I had the basic syntax of the tests themselves correct, partly because I'd read the documentation 10 times, and partly because I'd run some sample tests to ensure I knew how it worked. In the end, there was some stuff about exporting things from the main file that I hadn't accounted for. It was one of those moments where you could absolutely smack yourself on the forehead, but once you see it, everything else just falls neatly into place. The fact that these were new systems for me of course added to that.

I also liked Yup quite a lot - the documentation is very clear and the syntax is so simple and clear.

Diving into this with systems I didn't know was a little intimidating, but also exciting. I enjoy puzzling things out, seeing how they fit together, and that moment of clarity when I figure out how something works in the new system I'm learning, or how a new feature connects to another.

I think in the end I did pretty well. We'll see what happens, obviously. But I'm proud of the learning I did, at the least!