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...

In my code journeys and programming adventures I’ve encountered many strange foes, and even stranger allies. I’ve identified at least five different kinds of code warriors, some make for wonderful comrades in arms, while others seem to foil my every plan.However they all have their place in the pantheon of software development. Without a healthy mix of these different programming styles you’ll probably find your projects either take too long to complete, are not stable enough or are too perfect for humans to look upon. The duct tape programmerThe code may not be pretty...

I will be very honest with you in this post. Most interview articles only show obvious mistakes, as if most people don’t know showing up late is bad form. I will tell you the things I didn’t really know about until I was the one interviewing, and interviewing for a variety of positions and person-types. No interview prep article ever prepared me in the right way for how interviewers really think. That is what I will be sharing with you today.When you first walk in to my office, I am expecting you to be one of the 99%+ people who I know I won’t hire in the first 5 mi...

Being a programmer, you have an invaluable skill that you need to learn to harness. Investors realize this already which is why they’ll spend stacks of cash to have you build them something that’ll someday be profitable. Large corporations realize the value in good developers and sometimes bend over backwards trying to retain their top talent. To be able to program well is a skill that people clearly value but why do programmers tend to place such little value on their own talents?I know amazing developers who have spent the last decade building other people a fortune in IP while...

37signals recently launched public “Uptime Reports” for their applications (announcement). The reaction on Hacker News was rather tepid, but I think it’s a positive development, and I applaud 37signals for stepping forward. Reliability of cloud applications is a real concern, and there’s not nearly enough hard data out there. Not all products are equally reliable; even within 37signals, the new reports show a 3:1 variation in downtime across apps.That said, this is a fairly small step. For comparison, take a look at our public monitoring dashboard here at Sc...

With the rise of all these APIs and the browser race to implement them, you’d think that currently we can do pretty much everything in JavaScript and even if we currently can’t due to browser support issues, we will once the specs are implemented. Unfortunately, that’s not true. There are still things we can’t do, and there’s no specification to address them at the time of this writing and no way to do them with the APIs we already have (or if there is a way, it’s unreasonably complicated).We can’t do templating across pagesI don’t mean h...

A while back I stumbled upon a great post by Jean-Baptiste Queru. It describes the incredible depth of the modern technology stack. Layers upon layers of complex science, hardware, and software, each layer creating a simpler abstraction around the previous. This ultimately enables our paltry human brains to create amazing things that would otherwise be impossible (or really difficult). This is, in my opinion, the lifeblood of modern software development.For some reason, however, when it comes to front-end web development – meaning javascript – the stack is extremely shallow. Most...

Why do I hate Android? It’s definitely one of the questions I get asked most often these days. And most of those that don’t ask probably assume it’s because I’m an iPhone guy. People see negative take after negative take about the operating system and label me as “unreasonable” or “biased” or worse.I should probably explain.Believe it or not, I actually don’t hate Android. That is to say, I don’t hate the concept of Android — in fact, at one point, I loved it. What I hate is what Android has become. And more specifically,...