Whiteboard Coding
Whiteboard coding is hard. Especially for someone like me who once had a parent teacher conference solely because of his handwriting.
It’s hard, but you are going to have to do it during an interview. “Whiteboard” could be an actual dry erase whiteboard, or pen and paper or chalkboard or just verbally “writing” code. In any case it doesn’t involve a keyboard and so falls outside of most people’s comfort zones.
The best way to prepare for this is to practice.
For example, without using a computer:
Given a set of two dimensional points, find the closest one to a given target point. You can name variables and use whatever language you want, but the faster the better.
This is fairly easy, but its hardness magnitude is increased when you have to solve it using analog input. You could probably bang out a solution on your keyboard in under 30 seconds, but doing it standing up and with a marker will take you longer.
Not much fun is it? But it’s something you will have to do. Even in the work environment you will have to write code on a whiteboard to illustrate something to a coworker. Since it’s something you can prepare for now, it’s worth the effort to get comfortable with it before you’re in a situation where it’s for all the marbles and you choke.
