Overcoming Interview Anxiety
I won’t call it a fear, but I would like to overcome interview anxiety. I do not enjoy DSA interviews, it comes with some performance anxiety for me. I overcame my fear of swimming, and that’s a real fear for me. I get anxiety in interviews because I don’t enjoy them, and I decided to address this.
My plan is gradual progress. Leetcode is a lot of pattern recognition, and it is very targetted towards knowing what tools you have at your disposal before you attempt the problems. Just staring a Leetcode problem in the face for a few hours will not help you if you do not know you can code a specific way to solve this. I want to code out different data structures and algorithms step by step. To that aim, I’m maintain this repo.
I’ve tried this before, and I’ve never really enjoyed preparing for interviews. However, this time, I have purpose. I am trying to steer my career towards systems and performance engineering and I do not have the luxury of denying DSA interviews anymore. I do not want to take any job I get any longer, it has to meet my standards, and when it does, I will have to be ready to ace any manner of interview that the company desires to throw at me.
To that end, my approach is simple, gradual progress. I’ve asked Claude to come up with a list of exercises for me, small ones. Starting with stuff as small as “print every item of a list”, “print the largest item in a list”, “find if an item exists in a list”, “sum a list”, repeat for linked lists, maps, trees, graphs and so on. Then, I asked it to use incremental progress to draft up a TODO list of sorts, which is maintained in that repo in the README. I want to do this in Python, Javascript, and Rust. I’m not aiming for 100% completion, of course, besides in Python. In Rust, I do not want to waste time trying to build dynamic data structures, no matter how tempting that may be.
Following My Progress
I originally wanted to track my progress here, but I have a very simple way of doing that now, by linking to the public image, which is what the header image of this post is.
This image will be constantly updated in the repo to showcase what I’m learning and when it was last updated, the story of how I got to this image is pretty interesting, but not relevant to the task of learning. Yet, I’m going to share it below.
How I Visualize Progress using Claude
I was using Claude for housekeeping in that repo: