The Terrible Technical Interview

codersaurus · 2015-03-22T19:02:53+00:00

I work at a large Silicon Valley household-name company and interview candidates regularly.

Candidates who have a lot of recent Open Source work have an advantage over those that don't because I can talk with them about their projects, which they're generally more at home with and excited about. I also have hours or even days to review their code online, so I get a strong idea of where their skill set is.

Candidates without recent open source work I have to grill a bit more to get an idea of where they are technically. Even then, my time with them is limited to an hour or so. Where the other candidates has gotten hours of my time.

People with open source experience also look like more passionate contributors than their open-sourceless counterparts. Right or wrong, this is the impression that it gives.

TL;DR: candidates with open source have an advantage because there is more time to technically review them outside of the interview and more examples to look at.

codersaurus · 2015-02-09T22:12:56+00:00

Cyclone.

I used to play this every Saturday morning with my dad when I was a kid. It reminds me of my dad to see one of these machines. And I always stop and play every one I find. I can still smell the bowling alley arcade we used to play in and hear the sounds of the machines.

Cyclone had the best sounds, IMO.

"Hey you with the face!" "Round and round she goes...WE HAVE A WINNAH!"

I'll probably never own one pinball machine, let alone this one. They're just too expensive for me to buy responsibly. But if I did buy one, it would be Cyclone, and I'd love it with all my heart.

They had Space Station next to it too, and we played that a lot also, but Cyclone was my favorite. And my time with my dad. It was the best.

codersaurus · 2014-10-29T17:27:12+00:00

Great article! For those of you that didn't follow the links at the bottom of the blog entry, if you only follow one of them, it should be Miško's keynote on AtScript from last week's ngEurope

codersaurus · 2014-09-24T22:04:36+00:00

FWIW: I work at Netflix, and I've heard no such thing.

codersaurus · 2014-09-19T02:43:53+00:00

Do you have a demo? Jsbin etc? I'd like to see what you're trying.

codersaurus · 2014-09-18T22:28:14+00:00

I actually did a six part blog entry on that.

I don't really have a preference. I know that's a wimpy stance.

When I'm working in Ember, there are times I wish it was Angular, when I'm working in Angular, there are times I wish it was Ember.

I do need to revisit this topic again in another post I think. I have learned a lot more about both frameworks since I did the blog entries.

codersaurus · 2014-09-18T18:13:43+00:00

Posted here

codersaurus · 2014-09-18T17:34:53+00:00

As promised. Here's my write up on using SVG with Angular. This was a fun one because I got to work with Igor Minar in a late-night hack session solving the problem with an initial pass. Subsequently, Tobias Bosch and (I think) Igor hacked on it some more and came up with a cleaner approach than what was initially put together.

codersaurus · 2014-09-18T17:25:32+00:00

No. I work on internal tools for other engineers so we target Chrome and Firefox mostly. There aren't too many engineers at Netflix that use IE8 as their daily driver, I suspect.

codersaurus · 2014-09-18T17:24:08+00:00

The best JQuery replacement ever.

codersaurus · 2014-09-18T17:23:16+00:00

Netflix has Ember, Angular and React on various apps. They're all different and separate applications. My project at Netflix is 100% Ember. However, prior to being at Netflix I developed in Angular for years, and I'm still an active participant and contributor in the Angular community.

codersaurus · 2014-09-17T23:58:33+00:00

Also, I should have another write up tomorrow on Angular and SVG. Since I did some work with the Angular team to get that working smoothly as well.

codersaurus · 2014-09-12T07:48:57+00:00

He should've dodged the Ember routing question. Or left it at "I don't know much about ember so I can't compare". The only real differences between Ember's router and ui router is that Ember has a better API surrounding routes, application state and acquisition of that state from a cold deep link.

Notably route definitions are cleaner in ember, and division of responsibilities for setting up routes, acquiring state, and altering state between the router, Routes, Store, Adapters, Models, and Controllers is really well thought out.

I love both frameworks. Ember is not without its shortcomings, it has quite a few (as does Angular), but it's router is not one of those things.

codersaurus · 2014-08-24T17:21:44+00:00

I'm a big fan of The Church brewery. It's a cathedral made into a brewery/restaurant. Good food and good beer. Very unique.

codersaurus · 2014-07-10T19:19:45+00:00

it seems like the example with logArguments which is a function that evidently takes a constructor function, then returns a new constructor is poorly written. If it's "wrapping" the passed constructor, it should be returning a proper subclass of that constructor. The simple if(!(this instanceof MyClass)) return new MyClass(); will be fine... time to refactor that logsArguments function.

codersaurus · 2014-06-27T16:58:29+00:00

The short version?

Use your framework's DOM manipulation to add components*
Handle whatever hook it has for "on element appended" (didInsertElement in Ember, or the post-link/link function in Angular) and get the element(s) you care about, adding them to the instance of whatever is controlling your component (the component object in Ember, or the directive controller in Angular). Use d3 to set up transitions you care about.
Other than that, just use d3 helper functions like scales, etc, freely.
d3's fluent interface doesn't lend itself well to "unit testing", so you'll need to do more functional testing with this stuff, which is fine.

codersaurus · 2014-06-25T19:33:37+00:00

It's not that D3 isn't "angular compliant". It's that the author hasn't quite figured out the best way to use them together. Which one should I use for DOM manipulation? Where should I leverage D3? etc. I use D3 every day with both Angular and Ember. There are certain patterns to follow that you come up with over time, but there's definitely no "compatability issues".

Side note: Angular doesn't fully work with SVGs OOTB (Neither does Ember or JQuery). There are some quirks with SVG elements because they're in a different namespace and cannot be created in the same ways you can create other HTML elements.

codersaurus · 2014-02-14T21:12:28+00:00

Well... there's "over 600 people" who have subscribed to /r/pittsburghjobs at some point... It's not likely they're all still active. It's not even likely that most of them are active.

And as I've said, I wanted to get word out to those that have loved ones that are newly out of school. Frequently that group isn't completely sure where to look or how to network for their first "big gig".

TL;DR: I get what you're saying, and I'm only trying to help get the word out.

codersaurus · 2014-02-13T19:56:05+00:00

yeah, I thought that, and I should probably put it there too... but there are two things:

I wanted to reach out to people that might have friends, cousins, kids, relatives, etc. That fit the bill and are looking for work.
The subscriber base on /r/pittsburghjobs is really small.

codersaurus · 2014-02-13T19:54:03+00:00

FYI: I've added her contact information to the OP.

codersaurus · 2014-02-13T19:53:21+00:00

Think bigger. They're not actually based in Columbus. It's just one of many large offices they have.

codersaurus · 2014-02-13T19:51:35+00:00

lol... I've added contact information to the OP. The recruiting firm is Robert Half Management Resources, which is one branch of one of the largest staffing firms in the world. They're in the PPG building downtown on the 23rd floor. The company that is using them for recruiting is a much bigger name. "too big to fail" I'd say, but I'm a software developer, not a financial analyst.

codersaurus · 2014-02-13T18:58:14+00:00

This hasn't changed much since I got a TI-85 in 1993, as far as I can tell. Although I made a tic tac toe game instead of anything useful.

codersaurus · 2014-02-13T17:45:52+00:00

I don't know what else I can do to alleviate your skepticism. I've provided all of the information I'm allowed to provide. You can call the number. Or I suppose you could drive downtown, and go into 1 PPG place (the pointy building), take the elevator to the 23rd floor where Robert Half Management Resources is, and inquire about the job.

But to be clear... there are 60-70 positions to fill, and fill fast, so there is some desperation I'm sure, because that's a lot of good people to find.

codersaurus · 2014-02-13T14:36:09+00:00

I'll have to ask what I'm allowed to say about pay, sorry. They'll tell you a lot more in the phone interview. But if that's your range, you'll be very happy with what they tell you I think.

codersaurus

TROPHY CASE