This past week I underwent one of the most unique interview experiences I think I will ever have. As a final stage interview for JP Morgan Chase’s Early Career Software Engineer Program, I partook in a 12 hour mock hackathon with fellow candidates. Your reaction to reading that is likely very similar to mine when I first heard about the event. “12 whole hours!?”. “Working with fellow candidates!?”. On the surface, these seem like very valid reactions to what is a very intimidating event. However, after some mental reframing, as well as the benefit of assessing after participating, I can offer some different perspectives.
Have you ever wanted to add data visualizations to a JavaScript project? While there are ways of doing this with only the JavaScript standard libraries, it is fair to say that this process would likely be painstaking and not an effective implementation. Luckily, there are several libraries available to help make this process easier. One such library, and one of my favorites, is Chart.js.
You are likely familiar with JavaScript Object Notation, more commonly known as JSON. JSON is an open standard file format and data interchange format that is used to store and transmit data objects by making use of key:value pairs. While JSON has origins in JavaScript, there is support for JSON is nearly every programming language, as it has become a fairly ubiquitous way to store and transmit data.
I believe rewriting code is an essential part to maintaining a clean, efficient, and readable codebase, especially as a project continues to grow in scope and size. Sometimes the rewriting is just to keep things consistent (variable, function/method, class names, etc.), especially if there are multiple contributors on a project, or to improve the formatting of the code. Other times the rewriting is essential to bring current logic in line with features and/or code that has been added since the original code was written.
If you have worked in other languages and then come to Java, one thing that can take some getting used to is the fact that arrays in Java are of a fixed size. This means that once the array is declared and memory is allocated for it, that the number of elements can not be changed. This can lead to some difficulties depending on the use of your array, and what information you had at the time of creation. While there are several ways to work around this issue, including the use of the dynamically sized ArrayList class from the java.util package, today we are going to focus on the copyOf() method.