Tag Archives: interview

Let’s learn something new

Leave a reply

As for the work for web development class, this week concentrated on finishing up the midterm. I decided to interview Grzegorz Trzmiel, currently working as a developer at IBM. Even though I had to turn my notes and the recording into a post, I believe the traditional format of an interview definitely had its perks. Certainly, a good interview is the foundation of quality reporting – a skill, especially needed in my field of work. Such conversation is the best way of understanding a complex idea and seeing it from someone else’s perspective.

The interview provided me with the opportunity to investigate the concept of programming in a more in-depth way, compared to what I learn in class every week. I was able to discover how an actual professional thinks and feels about the programming skills needed in a real world and why he holds certain opinions. What was also interesting was that I could explore the use, effectiveness, and usefulness of programming skills I’m currently developing. As it turned out, one of the disadvantages of conducting an interview is that it is very time-consuming. Unfortunately, it consists of many stages; such as research, setting up a time that works for both parties, an actual interview, transcribing and drawing the final conclusions.

In general, the interview wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be. I did my research, was prepared and at the end wrote a great post (while, of course, respecting the interviewee’s privacy while not mentioning some of the names of Grzegorz’s previous employers). If you’re interested in seeing how well I did on my midterm, I invite you to read my post from yesterday 😉

JavaScript – Help!

1 Reply

The past two weeks, I’ve spent most of my time attempting to learn the building blocks of JavaScript and JQuery. This is by far the most difficult part of Codecademy thus far and has taken me the most time to comprehend and complete. I was able to conquer the first two lessons of Codecademy with a little difficulty; the thought process behind variables made sense. Once we began adding in Functions, strings, and loops, I started to lose the literal connection between JavaScript and a functioning website. I learn by doing and through visualizations.  In order for me to comprehend something, I have to be able to see what the end result is of something…and is the reason why science has never been my strong suit. I am hoping that in the next class, we can take a step back and look at the building blocks of JavaScript from the beginning. While I valued the time you spent teaching Java Script from the w3school code, I think I need to start from the beginning, looking at the big picture and then at each individual piece, because it all builds on each other.

In an effort to not fall behind too quickly, I found a few resources that I thought were helpful in learning more about JavaScript. You can find them linked below. I hope they are of use to the class as well! Please let me know if anyone finds any other helpful resources.

Additional JavaScript Resources:

  • HTML Dog
    • On HTML Dog, they have different lessons and pages that go through similar content that we learned on Codecademy. I appreciated how easy it was to follow along and didn’t feel as lost as I did when going through the Codecademy lessons.
  • YouTube Tutorial
    • I found it helpful to see someone else in action writing the JavaScript code and connecting it back to how it works on a website. That being said, it isn’t the most thorough video.

The second half of the week, I started working on the midterm interview by searching on LinkedIn for potential connections with web developers. Would interviewing a web developer from HHMI’s sister research campus be too close of a connection? I am nervous about this assignment. I haven’t interviewed anyone for a story since college and know that my journalism skills have fallen flat since then. I’m looking forward to the challenge and what I’ll learn from someone who has made a career out of web development.