I interview a lot of software engineers, and people (especially college seniors) frequently tell me that they want to work on “hard problems.” When I ask them what they mean, they generally talk vaguely about doing something algorithmically challenging on the back-end, maybe related to machine learning, natural language processing, or big data. They don’t […]
Category Archives: Coding
In a recent blog post, I recommended that you learn C++ for the deep understanding you’ll get of every other language you ever use. One of the key points is an understanding of how much it costs to create and manage an object, and how that affects the modern trend of deprecating primitives. In Ruby, […]
In my previous post, I described a simple interview question and the various approaches different types of programmers take. These weren’t mistakes per se, but they revealed biases and were good indicators of potential future problems, or holes in a programmer’s mental map. Like the candidate who sees everything in terms of recursion (or avoids […]
Over the past three years, I’ve easily done over a thousand technical interviews, each of which involved having the candidate write code on a whiteboard, either in person or online. There are lots of people who will try to convince you that this is a bad approach – that you should focus on what candidates […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 