I was recently involved in a discussion about the difference between encryption and hashing which made me realize that I didn’t have a great understanding of the difference, and decided to do a little more digging on the topic. As I was searching, I also came upon the topic of encoding, which added a different wrinkle to the idea of when exactly each concept should be used and the benefits of each. While all of these deal with the conversion of data into a different form or scheme, the process and reasoning for their use differs greatly.
A core characteristic about me, even since I was little, is that I love learning about new things. Truly, I have no idea what life would be like if I had grown up during a time period where I didn’t have the world’s collective knowledge available to me just by opening my phone. This is no doubt a strength in most cases, but as I began my job search I began to find the detriments to such a personality. This issue became more compounded by the fact that I am a person by nature who enjoys putting all my energy into what I’m doing; as you can imagine, this can be pretty difficult when you’re trying to juggle multiple job possibilities.
I recently had the opportunity to complete an online coding challenge as part of the interview process for a company that I’m really excited about. After I had finished it, I found myself pondering what I was taking away from the experience, and what I had learned about myself as a programmer, and wanted to write a blog post to reflect upon that.
While I have been working on numerous things since graduating from the Flatiron School’s program, one of my largest focuses has been on developing my Computer Science(CS) fundamentals. I learned so much during the program, but one of the biggest challenges I will face as I begin my career in web development will be handling scalability. When building small projects on my own, worrying about the size of inputs or the time functions has largely been irrelevant, as I’m dealing with a minimal amount of data. However, when it comes to working for a large company, I have begun to learn the importance of considering these concepts.
While talking with a friend recently who works as a web developer, he mentioned checking out vim. I was perplexed at first as I had never heard of it before. My friend explained that it was a text editor, but didn’t give much insight outside of that. As soon as I got home, I googled it and found that vim commonly came preloaded on many computers. I opened my terminal and entered ‘vim’ and was immediately taken to a bizarre screen with minimal instructions except for how to access a help screen. However, perusing the help contents proved less that fruitful. All the commands seemed like a different language!