SambaNova Post-Mortem

[darwinrlo]

What went right? What did I do right?

• I was able to come up with the high-level solution almost immediately. Where I faltered was making small implementation mistakes that I don't usually make due to nervousness.
• I was able to go into the interview with a mindset that was both realistic and productive.
• Although I wasn't able to identify every issue with my solution, I was able to identify and fix some issues.
  • I realized that my while-loops were missing an update of the iteration variable.
  • I realized that, after a recursive call returns, I have to pop the previous choice from the working combo.
• I was able to begin executing the code (using comments) on a test case as I had set out to do.

[darwinrlo]

What went wrong?

• I felt nervous.
  • Include meditation in my warm-up sequence. Be well-meditated before future interviews. Plan on finishing my warm-up sequence half an hour before the interview start to give myself time to be well-meditated.
  • Hold more practice sessions under realistic conditions. Schedule interviews using Gainlo, Interviewing, and Pramp.
• Print statements weren't working. This made it difficult to debug the code. I delayed troubleshooting this problem and didn't figure it out until the end.
  • Next time, consider getting the print statements working a priority.
  • If print statements don't work, one possibility is an infinite loop. Double-check the loop conditions and make sure the iteration variables are updated properly on each loop iteration.
• Initially, the logging was confusing. I eventually had to indent the logging for level of recursion depth. Not having done it very often, I felt mental resistance to implementing indentation.
  • Include indented logging in the warm-up routine. At the next interview, just do it from the start.
• I wasn't confident in the names of the list operations, e.g. add or append.
  • Include list operations in my warm-up sequence.
• I didn't increment the iteration variable in my while-loops.
  • Include while-loops in my warm-up sequence. An alternative is to use for-comprehensions instead. (Though I prefer while-loops.)
• Executing the code on a test case using comments took a long time especially since I was also narrating what I was doing.
  • Next time, before doing such a deep testing, see if I can first spot errors by just by narrating the code step-by-step.
• In my initial implementation, I neglected to ensure the target sum was greater than or equal to 0. For the base case, I only checked to see that there was one choice remaining.
  • Next time, when handling the base case, make sure to consider all parameters.
• I missed that, to prevent duplicates, each new choice has to be bigger than the last choice.
• I initially misunderstood the question. For some reason, I thought we were being presented with an input array.
  • Next time, come up with an example of an input and check it with the interviewer (per pgbovine's recommendation).