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 […]
Tag Archives: Coding
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? Who wouldn’t give their right shift key for entry into The Guild? Hackers are min-maxers – working late into […]
Being a single guy was fun. I could stay up all night programming, sleep in on weekends, hang out with friends, go to bars and clubs, hop on a plane on short notice and disappear on vacation for a week or five. I’d go out to a movie or restaurant without a second thought. I […]
I just installed Hadoop at home, and am working my way through the O’Reilly book. This is so that I can get to Hive, but no point putting the cart before the elephant. The annoying thing is that this is blocking me from getting to Bash Cookbook. And the Advanced Bash Scripting Guide. Once that’s […]
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 […]
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 […]