It’s hard to believe that Week 2 at Hack Reactor is already finished! I constantly go between feelings like I’ve been here for several months or several days, but definitely not 2 weeks. Keeping track of what day of the week it is has also proven to be a challenge. For example, yesterday I got to my local gym at 6 am only to realize that it doesn’t open on Saturdays until 8 am!

On a different note, the material at Hack Reactor has gotten progressively more interesting. This week we built a Dance Party game in jQuery using various CSS animations, explored how to design an algorithm to the classic N-Queens problem, and got introduced to the awesome data visualization libary D3.js.

What is D3.js?

D3 is a popular JavaScript library that stands for Data Driven Documents that allows manipulating DOM tree nodes (elements on a web page) using data. Prior to technology like D3, most data was visualized using bar charts, line graphs and pie charts. These tools date back to the late seventeenth hundreds. D3’s biggest appeal is that it allows to visualize large and complex data sets in the browser.

Introduction

After much anticipation, I just completed Week 1 of Hack Reactor. The last 6 days have been filled with lots of introductions, lectures, pair programming, and sprints. Admittedly, coming into this experience I had my doubts about how much I could learn in 3 months; however, after just six days of being surrounded by the incredible instructors and teaching staff, I can safely say that the amount I learned in the last 6 days would have amounted to several months of learning on my own.

One thing that drew me to Hack Reactor was its emphasis on software engineering fundamentals. Although the majority of coding at HR is done in JavaScript, the language itself is merely a gateway to engage with deeper computer science concepts. To no surprise, the overarching theme of Week 1 has been learning about the fundamental concept of software engineering - the analysis of algorithms and data structures.

What is an Algorithm?

Definition: “Algorithm – is a set of steps to accomplish a task”

An algorithm can be thought of as a recipe or a step-by-step set of operations for solving a problem. You may have an algorithm for making a sandwich, driving from home to

In Part I, we discussed the big-O notation and how to estimate the running time of a program. In this post, I’m going to apply time complexity analysis to various data structures. Understanding algorithmic complexity is crucial for software engineering because it helps identify areas in the program that can be optimized.

There are several types of complexities, which can be represented using the big-O notation, namely constant, linear, logarithmic, quadratic and exponential time.

Constant Time

Constant time implies that the number of operations the program needs to perform to accomplish a task is independent of the input size. Constant time operations are ‘order of 1’ or O(1). Examples of constant time are looking up a value in an array, finding the size of an array, or appending values to an array. As the input size grows larger, the time it takes to perform these operations remains constant.

Linear Time

Linear time indicates that run time of the function is directly proportional to the input size. In our phone book example in Part 1, if we examine every single name in the phone book until we found the one we were looking for, it would be considered as

Update (12/6/2016) - After 2 years of working in software engineering, I decided to start a podcast called Breaking Into Startups where we interview top bootcamp founder and alumni who broke into software engineering. Check it out http://breakingintostartups.com!

My Hack Reactor Interview Process

After weeks of researching coding bootcamps, I was convinced that I wanted to attend Hack Reactor except for a “minor” problem – the admission challenge. From everything I gathered to that point, the technical interview would consist of a 45-minute session over Skype where I would be asked to solve a series of coding challenges using my knowledge of JavaScript. For those less familiar with programming, an example of a coding problem would be something like building a function that checks to see if a number is prime. For starters, you have to know enough basic math to know what constitutes a prime number. Secondly, you have to quickly come up with the rules to determine if the number is prime. Lastly, you have to apply your knowledge of JavaScript to build these conditions into a function. If this doesn’t sound scary to you yet, remember that you have to do it in