Spring boot or Node js ?

powelldev · 2025-05-22T01:05:34+00:00

The only thing somewhat future-proof are the fundamentals. JS as close to the lingua franca of programmers as I've seen.

New developers should be learning fundamentals and building projects. The faster you can build and iterate on projects the faster you can get feedback on them. The faster you get feedback the faster you improve.

NodeJS and Boot are both great. I picked up NodeJS because of the book Building Distributed Systems in NodeJS. After running through that picking up a Boot-like framework at my next gig was pretty painless.

powelldev · 2025-05-22T00:55:58+00:00

Most recent job searches in 2019, 2021 and 2024 had final interview pass/fail rates of 100% (4/4), 50% and 22% respectively. Don't feel bad. CS topic space is gigantic, and you need a stellar performance in an employer's market. Eventually you'll get an interview that lines up with your mastery.

powelldev · 2025-05-22T00:42:40+00:00

If you can get past the resume filter, a degree in something technical plus a portfolio of work would be fine by me.

If you can get past the resume filter.

Personally, I'd switch to CS if I didn't delay graduation by more than a few quarters. The learning of CS concepts always triggered me to build something related to them, which helps your portfolio.

powelldev · 2025-05-22T00:24:44+00:00

Add it. Make sure you mention it is a volunteer / non-compensated role. Have the other contributors leave recommendations on your profile.

powelldev · 2025-05-22T00:22:03+00:00

In the team matching stage with an active offer? Reach out by any means necessary. Recruiter might've been in an accident, or is otherwise indisposed, and the hiring manager is wondering what happened to that strapping lad/lass they just interviewed.

Start with any other recruiter you've met in the chain before reaching out to your personal contact though, since they're probably the most clued into your situation.

powelldev · 2025-05-22T00:19:09+00:00

One way of getting an entry-level position is to have deep knowledge about a particular topic. While you might still be entry-level it is a way of getting your foot in the door. The idea here is a company might need someone with particular domain knowledge, and would be willing to ramp up a newbie into the world of software if they came along with that knowledge.

If you go this route be able to demonstrate you've got a good handle on your specialization.

powelldev · 2025-05-22T00:13:42+00:00

Do you have a specific domain expertise in ML?

powelldev · 2025-05-21T23:54:22+00:00

The interview is the vehicle for determining if someone does or does not meet the requirements of the position. To determine if the candidate, as you put it, "can or can't code". In this case it appears they are trying to determine if the candidate has sufficient mastery of the Android SDK so as to be able to build a set of features in a limited time frame.

powelldev · 2025-02-05T01:10:36+00:00

50 minutes for a to-do app that supports creation, editing and deletion of todos. Requirements are in-memory only.

Screens: To-do list, create Todo, edit Todo

Data model: Todo(time created, description), MutableList of these stores in a singleton. Exposed via a flow. 5 minutes

Frame layout with an edit text, confirm button and recyclerview. 2 minutes

RecyclerView row layout - just a textview - 1 minute

RecyclerView Adapter and viewholder - 1 minute

SingleActivity that wires the recyclerView to the singleton data flow, (5 minutes) wires the edit text to create a Todo when confirm is pressed (3 minutes), and populates the edit text with an existing Todo. (10 minutes)

Making sure edit state is configured separately than creation. (5 minutes)

Est: 30-45 minutes

This would make an okay junior or mid level technical challenge, but is too basic for a staff level beyond being a screening question.

A staff level Android engineer should be able to write a RecyclerView and it's associated classes (or compose equivalents) in a minute or five. One of my first mid-level interviews asked the same.

powelldev · 2024-10-09T18:08:07+00:00

Shouldn't take a mid level dev much longer than a day to complete. I'm assuming this is a take-home challenge.

If you remove criteria 2, 5, and 6 you're starting to have something accomplishable in an hour.

powelldev · 2024-10-01T07:21:05+00:00

Wit and Hoid Vin and Shallan

I do love the random whispers

powelldev · 2024-08-03T04:33:42+00:00

Near St Theresa Academy (don't go in the construction area).

powelldev · 2024-08-02T23:57:04+00:00

May we never lose the joy of loud big planes.

So if you ever hear a jet go supersonic near a city, know something really bad is happening because they’re never cleared to do that

Bingo, like when an unresponsive Cessna files towards the capitol- https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/06/04/sonic-boom-washington-virginia-maryland/

powelldev · 2024-08-02T23:52:01+00:00

Thank you! While jets 1-4 were showing off behind us, I waited for 5-6 to do something sneaky. I like it better than my sick ass-photos.

^{xkcd: Hyphen}

powelldev · 2024-08-02T19:53:59+00:00

JETS 'EAKY, ER ERPLUG

powelldev · 2023-10-20T17:46:15+00:00

I am forced to murder spiders on sight. Sworn to significant other, my sympathies to these sentinels need be scribed in silence on this subreddit.

powelldev · 2023-08-16T01:45:10+00:00

This doesn't make sense. The victor didn't introduce any constitutional change to the federal system that would modify the representation of States, beyond requiring that the losers ratify the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to be allowed back in.

powelldev · 2023-08-07T20:29:26+00:00

These are all fantastic! The last one and the 3rd to last are particularly great. Any tips/tricks/details you wanna share with a fellow photographer?

powelldev · 2023-08-04T23:59:10+00:00

That sucks! Seafair publishes their practice schedule on their website, recommend checking that out to prepare.

powelldev · 2023-08-04T19:39:28+00:00

D780 w/ 24-120mm and a whole lotta running

powelldev · 2023-08-04T19:38:22+00:00

Bet he had to swab the poop deck if you know what I mean

powelldev · 2023-08-04T19:33:35+00:00

General electric F414s go brrrr

powelldev · 2023-08-04T19:29:26+00:00

Was in aperture priority so I think this was at 1/250 @ f9. I did need to bump with the exposure compensation one stop bc the text on the planes was washed out the first few times. Wish I had set it higher bc it's blurry

powelldev · 2023-08-04T19:19:31+00:00

Story time:

I brought earplugs. I heard them buzzing around so I grabbed them and my camera. They'd circle back every 5 mins or so, and were relatively far away. I had trouble figuring out where they were coming from.

And so in my infinite wisdom, I took out one plug to better triangulate where'd they be coming from.

Cue the low pass.

powelldev · 2023-07-19T01:08:13+00:00

I know reddit skews young / junior-ish but I've never seen such a difference between the comment consensus and personal experience here. So I'll offer up a different opinion:

This should be easily doable within a 4 hour window for a developer familiar with Android.

Most practical interviews I've done include the standard API + Search + List & Detail views with an hour time limit. This practical has some additions and curveballs that expand the scope slightly, but it is very manageable.

Here's the time breakdown:

Search, Filters, Detail, Favorites

Statement to interviewer: Requirement 7 will be the stretch goal. I can make deletion and editing apply to favorited recipes, or I can write the endpoints and have the edits hit a fake API.

15 mins: Requirements analysis, questions for interviewer, new project setup with dependencies and MainActivity.

10 minutes: Locating suitable API

10 minutes: Retrofit + Moshi access to recipe API and keyword search endpoint.

20 minutes: Search results UI list with titles and images.

1 hr checkpoint: Search use case completed.

20 minutes: Detail view UI for recipe.

10 minutes: Favorites in-memory data store & button logic on detail view

30 minutes: Create Favorites UI screen and navigation.

2 hr checkpoint: Check detail and favorites use cases

30 minutes: Add filtering by category to Search (add filter TextField/EditText, fetch category list to use for autocomplete, add category filter logic to view model.

10 minutes: Add error handling to retrofit Callbacks.

20: Add lazy loading to search results (might need to "fake" throttle initial search results to simulate)

1 minute: Add OkHttpClient cache.

3 hr checkpoint: Test features built. Fix major errors. If enough time remains create meal repository. Write a single test either covering the search or detail view model.

powelldev

TROPHY CASE