Monday brings a big milestone in every Hack Reactor student's journey: the Technical Assessment.
My understanding is that this is the big filtering event of the program. If you pass, you've successfully demonstrated your grasp of the content introduced to the point. You can build full-stack apps. Not passing means that the staff doesn't have confidence in your problem-solving process and that you've demonstrated insufficient fluency with the libraries and frameworks we use.
I think there's a fair amount of anxiety within my cohort over the TA, and rightly so. It's a scary prospect, to not advance after five long hard weeks of study and sacrifice.
What will be covered?
Here's an off-the-top list of things that
I think may be covered (directly or indirectly) and that are fair game:
- React (props, state, components, event-handling)
- Node (callbacks, Babel, webpack, imports, general environment stuff, starting servers)
- VSCode (debugging)
- Express (setting up server, routing, callbacks)
- Databases (SQL, MongoDB/Mongoose, schemas, CRUD operations)
- General Front-End (importing static resources, ajax get/post)
How will I study?
Will I study? Yes. I would love to do full run-throughs of what I think are the critical sprints.
Those, to me, are MovieList (React), CowList (fullstack), and the Checkout mini-sprint (fullstack). This last one was good for Mongo, but I can probably get my Mongo work in by swapping it in for SQL in a project or two.
That said, I really only have tomorrow to 'study'. How much can I do in one day? I'm not sure. How much do I need to do? I don't think too much. I feel good about where I am. I think i'm in good shape. I feel ready.
One thing I can do is create some notes or some quick-references for specific topics.
I'll grade my perceived proficiency in the topics listed above. This is based on what we've been introduced to, not the whole scope of the tools. I'll also throw in my areas of weakness on each.
- React - 70%
- Node - 72%
- VSCode (debugging) - 78%
- Express - 75%
- Databases - 83%
- General Front-End - 80%
I think that's where I need to be to go into this TA confidently. Maybe I can nudge up each category by a few points tomorrow. Not necessarily with knowledge, but my reassuring myself that I know the topics well.
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