Curious is it normal to spend several days on these types of projects? Just wondering since I’ve heard some companies are starting to give take home assignments where you have like one day to complete several agile user stories for a project. And I feel like I’m taking too much time on each project atm.
If you’re just starting out, and are 3 projects in, and it’s the first time you’ve tackled such a scope, then yes, a few days, two weeks, or a month is normal. We each learn different parts at different speeds with different schedules. (Also the projects vary in number of user stories too, from 3 to the last one containing 8).
If you’re six months in, and are 50 projects in, and have tackled larger scopes, then I would say three days would be too long.
Personally (for context, I’m currently going through backend projects), for something of the advanced frontend scope, my target process is something like 30 min of reading the brief, 30 min. of planning the data structure (how many arrays, objects, etc), 30 min. of writing an outline of the functions, and then finally, 30 min. per function implementation or 1 hour per user story completion.
Another way to think about how productive your programming time is: how many times are you deleting and restarting parts of a project, per project? How soon in your process do you get the full understanding of the project’s problem? Is this before or after you implement most of the project?
Another way to think about interview readiness is: can you explain your approach before you’ve written code? Can you explain where you would place log statements and what you would expect the outputs to be?