Last night I attended the Codesmith’s “How to Whiteboard Effectively” online workshop, and I was so excited about it that I had to blog about it right away! It was extremely useful.
As the bootcamp is slowly coming to an end (we only have 2 months left!), I find it important to acquire other skills than just coding in Java,
One phrase the presenter said in the beginning really stroke me: “It’s usually done with someone you might potentially be working with. What they are really evaluating – “are you someone I would want to be working time with?”. It’s not something I thought about, but it totally makes sense and it changed my perception of whiteboarding completely.
The point of whiteboarding is not that you find the exact solution, it’s more about:
- your technical thinking,
- breaking down a problem,
- communication,
- how you approach new problems,
- your soft skills.
Whiteboarding steps:
- understanding the problems (asking additional cases)
- inputs and edge cases
- pseudo code the solution
- write the solution on the board
- test the solution
- evaluate the solution (communicate the efficency of it).
How to divide the board:
It’s always important to paraphrase the task and ask any additional questions you might think of. I loved the example given:
Even if you’re stuck, you need to communicate with your interviewer, most likely they will give you hints and guide you through it.
The first 3 steps should take about a third of your interview time.
Avoid coding in silence! You should always be engaging with your interviewer.
At the end of the workshop the presenter did a live demo implementing everything he was talking about earlier and it was awesome! Here’s the result of the demo:
I definitely learned a lot and I’m happy I attended!
Kristina's blog 