I recently interviewed at a major technology company. I won't mention the name because, honestly, I can't remember whether I signed an NDA, much less how strong it was.I did well. Mostly because of luck. I normally step over myself when I interview. I guess I've improved over the years. Here are a few tips to ace your own interview.1. Don't write on the whiteboardWhen I interviewed at Palantir around 5 years ago, I had a lot of trouble with this. Yes, I knew next to nothing about computer science then, but I should have been able to answer many of those questions. For example, Palantir ask...

Although DuckDuckGo's success is based more on ideology than technology, you'd have to be a pretty arrogant technologist to not appreciate and be impressed with what this small team (for a long time, 1 person) has accomplished. And while DuckDuckGo teaches us a number of valuable lessons (about business, and privacy), to me, the most important, is that good programmers should be measured by what they can learn, not what they already know.Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo's creator, has been wonderfully transparent about his love-child. One theme which has come up a few times is his lack of experien...

You might know from experience that planning for a wedding is no simple feat. In the months leading up to our wedding, my then fiancé and I spent countless hours planning and making sure that no detail was overlooked. Among our top priorities was finding a skilled baker to create a delicious and beautiful cake. On the recommendation of a friend, we considered a baker named Jennifer. We read her "culinary resume." We were impressed by her references and experience, and our initial conversation with her went really well. Still, we didn't want to make an important, life-affirming decision abou...

Yesterday, I shared an anecdote involving a school I once attended with a list. This anecdote eventually became the basis for a blog post. Traffic was fairly normal for the first few hours until it found its way onto hackernews.Then it exploded.The comments on both the original blog post and the post on hackernews filled almost immediately with opinionated hackers, teachers and students sharing similar experiences, discussing the problem and figuring out what should be done about it.Repeatedly, the argument was made that the education system is smothering creativity, actively discouraging...

Without even a pinch of doubt, the labor market across the globe has turned highly competitive. So, there goes a rat race where the best recruiters vie to hire the most potential candidates. Let's say you need to hire Java developers. Certainly, your hiring challenge would be to find applicants with niche skills. Sadly enough, the traditional hiring methods are detrimental to getting the creme of the talent pool. It's time-consuming and involves a lot of manual and paperwork, wherein there are companies which have already adopted the trendy approaches to recruitment thereby attracting the skil...

As a developer, you are sitting on a goldmine. Do you even realize it? No, seriously, a @#$% goldmine!Never in modern history has it been so easy to create something from scratch, with little or no capital and a marketing model that is limited only by your imagination.Think about the biggest websites you visit or use on a regular basis: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare, or even Google for that matter -- all of them were created by developers who created something from little more than an idea in their head. Was it easy for them? Heck no. But it could only have been done in today's day and...

Over the last few weeks I’ve been interviewing with Google for a job doing primarily JavaScript development. I didn’t end up getting the job but I thought I would share the process of interviewing for Google as it was both very exciting and a humbling experience. I can’t reveal everything as I’m under a few NDAs. I’m not going to mention the products or teams that I was interviewing for but you may be able to guess.For those that don’t know me, I’m an independent developer/designer. A majority of my work falls into the four categories of JavaSc...

This editorial was originally submitted to the Sydney Morning Herald in response to an editorial proclaiming that people wanting to become software engineers should not attend university and instead learn a current popular programming language.  Over the past few years I’ve developed software for large corporations, started the Vodafail campaign, co-founded Mijura and represented Australia in the global Robocup (humanoid robotic soccer) competition. I graduated from University of New South Wales School of Computer Science & Engineering this past year with a Software Engineering...