Good morning Dave and readers! I'm feeling so amazing today. I think it's time to tell a secret, I have a call with a company today! It's the first call and likely more of a screening call. I was referred by a friend to a startup company he works at, funnily enough founded by the founder of Sunday Hustle group himself. It's an incredibly interesting company working on a radical new approach to databases on the frontend of applications. Very excited for this opportunity!

First and foremost, I need to prepare for my call. I need to mentally prepare myself and get locked in. I really need to focus on doing some more inital research about the company and their technology. I've already done extensive research, but I need to take some time to collect my thoughts. I want to come up with some interesting questions to ask during the interview, both because that's good signal in an interview and fuck I'm curious! I also need to spend time going back to re-document a lot of my old projects. That means actually going on github and writing project readmes, and then adding these projects onto my website under the projects tab.

Lots to think about today. My soft skills during a recruiter screen are going to be tested today. My communication will be a large point of work today. How well can I communicate my technical abilities, as well as give great signal to an interviewer. On a more technical note, I need to really learn how to better document projects.

I'm nervous for the phone interview. 100%. Nervous and excited. I'm worried that for reworking my projects, I may be slow in writing and don't really know how to write good high level documentation.

So without further ado, let's get going. It's 9:33 AM right now and my phone screen is at 11:00 AM. I'm going to split this up into 3 segments, pre interview, interview, and post interview:

Pre Interview:

1. I need to spend maybe 45 minutes compiling a list of projects. Since I want to be able to refer to projects during the interview, quality is going to be more important than quality.
2. I need to write BASIC documentation for all projects I want to show off.
3. I need to take my documentation from github and transfer that to the projects page on my website.
4. After documenting my projects as a first pass, I can spend more time organizing/ordering my projects and focus on polishing my most important projects.
5. 30 minutes before the interview starts, I need to go over my research about the company. I need to get a piece of paper out and brainstorm. Questions for the interviewer, a game plan, and other general items.

During Interview:

1. Be myself. My friend who referred me gave me advice on to "not be too professional", and to "just be myself".
2. Easy. I'm always myself, for better or for worse lol
3. Listen.
4. Ask deep technical questions.
5. Avoid monologuing.
6. Take some notes!

Post Interview:

1. Reflect on how the interview went.
2. Think about next steps for moving the process along.
3. Continue massive effort of documentation.