My Interview Experience with Coding Mart
How I got selected at Coding Mart and what skills mattered.
On September 11, 2019, I received information about an off-campus recruitment drive. The Coding Mart company was organizing this at the NGP college. My friends rushed and reached there at around 9 am. As none of us had ever been to that college, Google Maps guided us all the way!
Seeing the crowd of over 200+ students, we were very curious and also felt a bit nervous. After the presentation, the company commenced the recruitment process. It consisted of 3 rounds in total. In the 1st round, we were provided with a game along with its code. There was a bug in the game and we had to debug it. Around 12 students were shortlisted for the next round and I was also one among them!
In the 2nd round, and it was for a time duration of 2 hours. In the 1st hour, we had to learn the ‘AngularJS’ framework. In the next hour, we had to complete the task of building a simple app (using ‘forms’) using the same framework.
The final round was an HR interview. They selected only 4 students (including me) for this round. The interview was for almost one hour. After a gruelling 4 hours, out of 200+ students, only 3 students got selected. I am very happy that I was one among them!
What helped me to get placed in this company?
The answer is simple and it is best described in two words: “Passion & Perseverance (P2)”. Yes! This is what was core to what help me achieve the success that I experienced. How about knowledge/skill? Did that not help me? Yes, of course! But first, let me elaborate more on the outcome of P2.
Being a programmer, I find it appropriate to express my experience in the form of a simple line of code. This is my ‘code of success’:
while (!LifeEnd) {
gainKnowledgeAndSkill =
P2(consistent(connect(aspire(curious(like(try(void))));
}My Learning Journey
I joined the college with a void mind. From there, I came to know something about programming. So, I just tried writing small coding exercises and I liked it. I began to feel like I’m a programmer by writing these small codes. Then, I got an aspire to become a programmer.
Because of my fondness for programming, I connect ed with Dr Ashok Bakthavathsalam. As a mentor, he taught me several things. How to approach the problem statements? How to think incrementally? How to write elegant code? How to enhance my logical thinking and programming skills? He also taught me to always remember the 4Ps (Promise, Publish, Persist and be Present).
Through consistent practice, it became my passion!
Armed with programming skills, I was very keen to tackle some projects. But I didn’t know how to.
That’s when I ran into another mentor, Bharathy mam. It was only because of her I came to know about FreeCodeCamp. At the Hackerspace zone within the college, I learnt about HTML, CSS and JavaScript during my free time. With this knowledge, I started from building some very simple projects. First, a Tribute web page. Then a portfolio web app. I then built a few front-end web apps like ‘Infix to Postfix visualizer’ and the ‘Bitly crawler app’.
She also taught me the OOPS in Java. I got a clear view of what is Java and its core concepts. Whenever I get stuck with some of the concepts, I approached her. She clarified all my doubts by explaining it with real world examples in a most simple way. And she also taught me how to relate all those concepts with one another.
Now that I had some ‘front-end’ development experience, I focused on building some back-end skills. So, I started to learn a server-side language NodeJS all by myself. But in the beginning, I felt a bit difficult to understand it. I spoke to Bharathy mam about the difficulty of mastering NodeJS. Immediately thereafter, she conducted a workshop on ‘MongoDB (NoSQL), NodeJS & normalization of RDBMS’. During the workshop, the hands-on session provided by Dinesh brother (from KGCAS, MSc) was excellent. Because of him, I gained a clear understanding about two things. Firstly, about the fundamentals of server-side language. Secondly, about CRUD operations in a database.
I put my newfound back-end skills to good use immediately. I built two web apps with MongoDB as the database. They were Receipt Generating APP (Finance Receipting using RPA). The other one was RECAAP (repl.it Classroom Analytics App). While developing these apps, I learned a lot on how to handle and process data on the server-side. I also learnt how to retrieve and filter data from the database.
Eventually, I would push myself to take part in various hackathons. And experienced good fun and great exposure because of it.
What really mattered and how?
For the first tworounds, we had the freedom to Google for the answer. Actually, for the 1st round, though we had that privilege, it wasn’t necessary to search Google at all. All you need to know was how to read the given code. You also had to understand what the heck was happening. If you knew to do both, clearing that round would have been a cakewalk. Since I had projects under my belt, that skill was 2nd nature to me. Hence, I cleared that round with great ease.
Similarly, in the 2nd round, I didn’t know anything about the AngularJS. But I cleared that round too. Because, I realized that since I knew JavaScript, learning AngularJS will an easy hill to climb. That worked out for me!
Skills do matter for a company like Coding Mart. Throughout the interview process, I demonstrated the skills that I had acquired during the 3 years of my engineering studies at KGiSL Institute of Technology. By the way, those skills did not come in overnight.
On that day, after the HR interview, they called out the placed students again inside the room. They congratulated us. And while leaving, they wished me, “Happy Onam!”
I was double happy I got selected in the company on a very special day! And finally, I returned home by 11 pm and had a great sleep!
Try ->
Liked ->
Curious ->
Aspire ->
Connect ->
Consistent ->
Became my passion!By now it must be evident that the above flow was consistent in all my experiences!
My heartfelt thanks to all my mentors. Without them, I don’t know where would I be now. They taught me, tuned me in the right path, both personally and technically. They encouraged me whenever I felt low. They found the real potential in me, brought it out and made me realize it.
Dear mentors, thank you for all that! I promise you that I’ll always make you proud, wherever I go, whatever I do in future!
And finally, I would like to close with a quote which I always believed to be true:
“Nothing is impossible until it is proven to be…”
