I’m not a Linux guru. I’ve always known just enough to get the job done, but was never focused on getting deep into the command line for its own sake. Ever since joining the devops team at TripAdvisor almost two years ago, though, and more recently taking responsibility for operations at Scratch, I’ve had to learn a much broader array […]
Category Archives: Coding
You wouldn’t think that a post like this would be necessary, but as I recently went through a frustrating bit of config hell in what I’d expected to be a straightforward process, I thought I’d write down the procedure that worked for me. Download and install Android Studio Download the latest version Follow the instructions […]
We had a problem. Facebook had just come out with the Like button, and had provided code snippets that allowed you to badge pages with Like counts. The problem was that it took a couple seconds for the number of Likes to load, and in some cases the resulting text was bigger than the allowable […]
I commuted for years. Up and down Route 95, every day, over and over. On a good day it might take me 45 minutes to an hour each way, but one and a half hours was common, and there were a couple of three hour nightmares tucked in over the years. At the same time, […]
In 1997, Clay Christensen published the landmark book The Innovator’s Dilemma. In this book he went through a variety of industries (hard drives, backhoes, steel mills) and demonstrated the frustratingly similar pattern of how companies innovated, then stagnated – for entirely rational reasons. The key graph looks like this: The idea is that for any product, […]
Stage 1: The opportunity At first, you’re excited. Something shiny and new! You’ve always wanted to learn this new thing, a language perhaps, and whether through planning or circumstance, you finally have your chance. Stage 2: Unwarranted optimism So you Google for tutorials, work your way through one or two, buy a book, start a MOOC. […]
I was running late. I needed to get to work and was on my way out the door when I suddenly remembered that I’d forgotten to make lunch. Not a big deal – I usually just slap a PB&J together – but I was already late, bundled up and mentally on my way. It was going to be […]
In a recent post I talked about some gotcha-type questions / Java quirks, but there’s a more fundamental gap that I see all the time – primarily in coders who have never been forced to program in C/C++ at some point. There are some basic pieces of knowledge, some tricks of the trade that everyone […]
For the past year or so, I’ve been asking an interview question which seems like it should be straightforward, but has turned out to be deceptively hard. The reason I like it is that it requires a candidate to convert a very common, well-defined, well-understood task from paper into code. There’s no trick, no gotcha, no […]
Interviewers are a diverse lot. Some care about this, others about that, each has her own set of biases, and short of being perfect, there’s really no way to please everyone. The worst is when you’re doing well, then get hung up on an obscure language feature that the interviewer decides is make-or-break. This says more […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 