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 […]
Category Archives: Coding
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 […]
College recruiting season is almost upon us again, and I’ve been doing a little research to try to find a new question. My current question is OK, but it’s a little clunky, and I’ve been sniffing around for something new. In my research I’ve been going through Programming Problems. It’s a good compendium of the different […]
It hit me while I was walking down the street in a chic Tokyo suburb, an honest-to-God bolt from the blue mindfreak of a satori. It hit me so hard I had to stop, find a place to sit, and think for a while. I had a good life in Japan – an amazing group of […]
So, it’s time to retire my interview question. It feels like people are doing better on it than they used to (Glassdoor?), and frankly, I’ve asked it so many times that just walking into an interview room is enough to make me want to start chewing my own arm off. Still, if I’m going to […]
When I was 8 years old, I remember having a friend over to dinner one fateful night. Sometime during the course of the meal, someone told a funny joke, and I burst out with an explosive laugh – which wouldn’t have been a big deal, except that my mouth was full of milk. My parents […]
I’ve been thinking (again) about what it is that makes some coders special, and have come up with the following idiosyncratic, completely unscientific, my-employer-does-not-endorse-my-views classification. It should go without saying (but won’t) that not only is this graph not to scale, but that it’s a pretty scary power function as you move up the pyramid. […]
When I joined TripAdvisor, I’d been out in the world as a professional coder for a decade and a half. I’d had significant management roles at a prior company, and had just come off of six years of running my own company. I was used to being in charge. And so, when my soon-to-be-boss asked […]
When I was in high school, I used to amuse myself by multiplying four digit numbers in my head. It was a point of pride that I had memorized all of my friends’ phone numbers. I even worked out my own (possibly incorrect) version of the Doomsday rule (no, no, of course there was no […]
Paradigms matter. The Pythagorans killed the discoverer of irrational numbers because they didn’t fit within their world view. The Romans had a numerical system that was actively antagonistic to arithmetic, and made no significant mathematical discoveries. The Arabs, on the other hand, had much the same numerical writing system as we use today, developed the […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 