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. […]
Tag Archives: coding
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
Procrastination is triage with a machete and a blindfold. Hackers are min-maxers. Python is the programming language equivalent of juggling one ball. In order to exceed expectations, you first have to meet expectations. The bottom always eats the top. You have to be nice before you can be mean. With very few exceptions, every single […]
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. – Winston Churchill I get asked a lot by non-technical people why it’s so hard to find good technical talent. How it is that we can do so many interviews, yet make so few […]
Hackers are cool. Described and celebrated by luminaries such as Eric Raymond and Paul Graham, they’re the self-styled “rock stars” and “ninjas” of the industry. Indeed, who wouldn’t want to be the next Wozniak, Torvalds, Carmack, Jeff Dean? Who wouldn’t give their right shift key for entry into The Guild? Hackers are min-maxers – working […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 