So, my wife took our almost-7-year-old daughter with her to visit a friend in New Jersey yesterday. They slept over and I stayed in with the baby, because its just way too hot to take her outside this weekend. After she fell asleep, I stayed up all night and finished the Lambda School Full Stack Web Development Pre-course. That was about 7:45 this AM. I then registered for the Challenge, which is the last thing I need to complete before class starts on August 5th and failed to complete it, a little before 9:30 AM. :(

The challenge is timed. You have to answer 3 questions in 45 minutes to pass. All three of my questions were JavaScript code which I had to modify to get specific answers. I got through the first two questions in under 5 minutes and felt pretty good about my ability to pass.

There was a warm-up question before the real ones began. Mine had me modify a function to return True, which I was able to do quickly. I then moved onto the actual challenge.

The first question asked me to modify a function so that more than one variable’s boolean value returned certain results. It was fairly easy and I was able to answer it by writing a simple method.

The second one asked me to add a method to an array prototype that returned True under certain conditions and False if those conditions weren’t met. I was able to do this without any trouble as well.

Then it was time for the 3rd question. I had about 40 mins to complete it, but didn’t know that this was what the real challenge was. I had to modify a function to return a copy of a given array, which shouldn’t have been an issue – but it had to be sorted in ascending order, and the original array couldn’t be modified. The array was numeric. The answer/output would also look at two items to determine if it was successful: the order of the numbers in the original array, and the order of the numbers in the new one.

Sorting isn’t something that we covered in the pre-course. I thought this might have to do with push/pop methods in an array, and started sketching out an algorithm in Notepad, to give me some guidance when writing the code, but I wasn’t successful. I watched the timer click down, and by the time I had 5 minutes left, I knew that I wasn’t going to succeed.

Ultimately, I was greeted with this:

I checked out the Slack channel. After completing the pre-course, I had posted there to share my initial success with my potential future cohort. This time, I wrote a message announcing my challenge failure, and asking about the 3rd question. What I really wanted to know was – since it asked about topics that hadn’t been covered in the pre-course, were we supposed to go outside, like to Google or Stack Overflow, or somewhere else for help?

Apparently, the answer was yes. The last challenge seems to have been designed to make us look for information on-the-fly for a topic that we haven’t learned, because that’s a regular process in the workplace – something I can actually attest to by regularly experiencing it at work.

I didn’t know this going in, and it also opens ALL of JavaScript’s concepts to be potential challenge questions in the future, so, I’m going to have to sharpen my search and apply skills considerably before my next attempt. I don’t know if “once a day” means after the clock says midnight (3AM for me, since they’re on Pacific time and I’m in NY), or if it means once every 24 hours, but I’m going to find out tonight.