pre-hr-learning-recommendations

Some less technical things worth jumping into before you begin Hack Reactor. Plus some recs for having your dev environment ready

Gratitude

A lot of this has been influenced by the following brilliant people:

About

I wanted to jump into a ton of stuff before I started and didn't have time to do so. The things I'm about to list are more complementary to the course than advantageous. It's all the stuff I wish I knew or did more of before I started. This material will give you a much more well-rounded experience (in my opinion) and also prepare you for your impending job search.

Online Presence

If you want to build your online presence, the following things are useful:

Set up a blog. Don't worry about where it's hosted or what CMS you're using. The sooner you're writing, the better. Here's a few options, pick the one that works best for you:
- Ghost
- Medium
- Jekyll
- Wordpress
- Blogger
If you don't already have one, sign up for a Stack Overflow account. The site was intimidating for me at first because of its Q&A non-forum format, but it's extremely useful. Contribute as much as you can.
Sign up for an account on Quora and help answer questions. There's a lot of people asking questions about HR. Try and answer them to the best of your ability.
Tweet about tech. Whether you're retweeting something you find on Hacker News or a blog post you just wrote. It's going to be interesting to someone.

Algorithms and code

It doesn't hurt to get started. When you start interviewing around, you're going to be doing three things: Talking about yourself, about JS trivia, and tackling algorithms. The sooner you're familiar and comfortable with them, the better

Start tackling algorithms on sites like Code Wars, Hacker Rank, etc. they're super fun.
Alternately, jump into Cracking the Coding Interview once you're comfortable.
If you have time, watch Harvard edX videos. CS50 and CS75 were pretty useful for me once I started interviewing.
Learn sorting algorithms now.
Hired In Tech is a great resource.

Workflow

Workflow is everything. It's how you leverage your ability to get more things done in a much more effective manner. Learn to love your keyboard and abandon the mouse/trackpad. The sooner you can rely on yourself to be faster, the more efficient you're going to be. You're an engineer, and you really have no excuse to not know this stuff.

Install Spectacle for managing and resizing your windows. It's incredible.
If you use Chrome (and you should, since it has the best debugging tools), you should install Vimium, which gives you access to some incredible keyboard shortcuts for browsing the web. It's great because you'll rely much less on your mouse.
Customize your bash profile. This one from an Josh Wyatt is stellar.
Alternately, consider Zsh
Mackup can help you sync dev environments across machines if you’re like me and have a desktop + laptop.
Alternately, I synced just my Sublime Package Control using Dropbox.
Additionally, Josh gives an awesome keyboard shortcuts talk.
If you want even more than that, check out these power tools for productivity — I got the most value out of this one from David Ernst

Dev Environment

You're going to set up a lot of this at HR anyway, so why not start now?

Get Brew, the package manager for your Mac.
You'll be using Node (and npm) in the very near future, so you may as well install it now. Follow this fantastic guide to get started and install them the right way.
Get some nice fonts for your terminal and text editor. I like Source Code Pro in my text editor and Input Mono for my command line.

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