Making a game-plan for the next 2 months - What do I need to study, and what should I prioritize?

So, this is going to be a some-what daily blog as I start getting ready to go hard the next 3 months and secure a position by then. I hope that I can transfer this blog to an AWS hosted system rather than bother the fine folks at Netlify with this freely hosted site, but for now, I will just document what I feel I need to do this month.

First off all, I am going to heavily reference the materials given in Lambda CS wiki, and some other resources given here in this guy’s plan to get into Amazon and Google. It’s not necessarily my goal to get into these companies (although they seem amazing, like all the larger tech companies, mostly because they are filled with people that are big dorks, like me!), but if they are the gold standard, it would be prudent to use that as the benchmark and work to that proficiency level. https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university#why-use-it

Anyway, there is a bunch of stuff I need to do in the next 2.5 months (my stated goal is to get at least 3 offers by then, so I can secure a decent life for Sayo and I, and work to my eventual goal of making that multi-language language teaching platform that I have been sitting on for so long). The main things I need to focus on are the technical interview, which focuses on coding challenges and understanding of CS topics, and … well, that’s the main part. Anything that can strengthen me for that is what I need to do. This will probably mean a heavy, heavy focus on my Intro to Algos textbook (by Cormen etal), and then working through Elements of Programming Interviews. Whether or not I can do all this in the time that I have (3 or so months at the max!) while setting up my clean, simple portfolio, making a strong, technical resume, and researching companies in the Bay Area (and along the West Coast) is going to be a challenge, along with managing my expectations and not being dejected from possibly 100s if not multiple 100s of companies. I wish there was a cleaner, less exhausting way to prove my value, but I have to understand just how desirable this chosen career path is, and the competition there is.

I am not sure how to show how many years I have put into messing around with coding, and how to explain my minor in C.S. from a Japanese University, especially since it is not an obvious program highlighted from my university. I guess I can show my thesis, but that is much more associated with Computer Engineering than Computer Science (which is thrown into a generic bucket labeled ICT in Japan). I will have to look into that as soon as possible.

At least for this weekend, I will try to get a basic technical resume down, get a basic portfolio up to link to my Labs project, my build week project, and my newly built out Lambda Notes project (planning to resurrect that as an overall notes keeper for CS). I also have a big plan to integrate my old neural net “Dog or not?” project and try to integrate the flask app into a webapp, but that might be very difficult. Still, something to think about.

I am a little burned out right now, but I think that putting my ideas in this blog is starting to help my mental state. It is helping me distill my ideas into a much more cohesive form, and I can even start to see where I am analyzing an issue wrong, which is invaluable. I only hope that eventually, all this hard work I have been putting in for the past 6 years will finally pay off, and I can join all those engineers I have always wanted to be a part of.

Written by Kai Lovingfoss who lives and works in San Francisco building useful things.