Regular Geek » Miscellaneous

Helping With Digital Curation

Rob Diana — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:56:49 +0000

I have previously talked about digital curation and that you should follow my shares in Google Reader. The problem is that only some of you use Google Reader, some use Google Buzz and everyone else is using Twitter and Facebook. I do not want to clutter my Twitter stream with my 40 shares per day, so I am thinking of taking a slightly different direction. I also did not want to push daily content down my RSS feed without seeing how the readers of this blog felt about the idea.

So, I am thinking of creating a daily post that is the list of articles that I am sharing from Google Reader. This is a typical links post, but there will be somewhere between 30 and 40 links per day. The post will probably be published in the morning around 9AM US-Eastern time. Please vote in the poll below. If you have other comments, feel free to comment on this as well.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Regular Geek Gets A Redesign Mostly

Rob Diana — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 12:33:23 +0000

This post is just a quick note to let people know that the blog has visually changed. There is a new layout, not completely different than before, but definitely different.

One thing you will notice on the right side are the new social images. There are convenient buttons you can use to follow me on Twitter, Facebook or Google Buzz. You can still find me on other sites that I am not as active on the About page. There are also big buttons for following the RegularGeek blog on Twitter, via RSS or Email. The RegularGeek Twitter account currently has only posts from the blog, but I am looking for interesting ways to use it if you have any ideas.

Another change I wanted to point out was the social sharing options on each post. Beneath the post title you can see four icons that you can use to share RegularGeek posts with Twitter, Google Buzz, Facebook and Digg. These icons also appear at the bottom of each post as well. Feel free to share the posts on other social sites as well.

Over the rest of the summer, other things will be changing as well. I will eventually have a logo, but that is still being worked on. Some of the navigation will change, and the static pages will be changing as well.

So, if you are reading this post in an RSS reader, please take a look at the site to see the new changes. As always, let me know in the comments if you like it or hate it.

What Interview Questions Are Helpful In Hiring Developers?

Rob Diana — Fri, 07 May 2010 17:46:08 +0000

Interviews are always an interesting topic, and for software engineers the interview process can take many forms. First, there is the standard interview where you are asked questions regarding the technologies that the potential opportunity uses. Those types of questions are always useful because you can find out if someone is lying on their resume or just how much they really know about a given topic. On the other end of the spectrum, there are the puzzle interviews that Microsoft and Google have become famous for, even though Google no longer uses puzzles. Somewhere in between are those interviews where you get a significantly different programming or design question that is meant to take 15 to 30 minutes of the interview.

I have talked about interviews, job searches and hiring before. In once case, I talked about finding a job that fits from the perspective of the job searcher. Those same questions can be asked by the interviewer to determine whether the prospective employee would be a good fit for the organization. As I stated in that post, some people can thrive in the small company atmosphere, while others require the structure of larger companies. However, those organizational questions still do not get to the heart of the problem. Is this person someone we want to hire? Will this person be productive in our environment? One thing I should note, if your company only hires due to specific technology needs, then you do not need to read any further. Those interviews typical focus on specific technical knowledge, and the rest of this post is not about that. This post is more about those weird puzzle questions.

Are puzzle interview questions helpful in hiring developers? This is an interesting question because so many companies still use puzzle questions in their interview process. The idea behind these questions is that you are supposed to get an idea of how the person thinks through a problem. However, many puzzle questions do not require the interviewee to think for very long. They either get the answer right away, or they require a few hints. A good example of a puzzle question is The Rope Bridge. It is one of the more relevant puzzles, but how much does it help you determine whether your interviewee will be a good developer in your organization?

The other side of this are the “fish out of water” questions. What I mean is that you have the interviewee explain a system for something they have not thought about before. These questions are more easily applied to application design. For example, one design question I have seen is the “elevator system”. Unless they worked in embedded systems, it is unlikely that they have run into this type of situation before. This type of question gives you an idea of how they think through an unknown problem domain. The only issue with something like the elevator system is that people may have problems determining the objects and behaviors within the system. Sometimes an unknown domain means that there will be more questions than answers.

Finally, there are the programming questions that people use. The utility of these questions vary greatly as the complexity is typically varied as well. You can start with fairly simple questions like “FizzBuzz“, where you write a function that prints “fizz” when a number is divisible by 3, “buzz” when the number is divisible by 5 and “fizzbuzz” when the number is divisible by both 3 and 5. The solutions is quite simple, but it does tend to stump a lot of people. Personally, I do not like “FizzBuzz” because it does not tell you much about a senior level engineer. The problem with simple questions is that interviewees may think they are harder than they really are. Just a few months ago, I wrote about hiring programmers and one statement is very relevant to this discussion, “Most people tend to get very nervous during an interview which makes even simple programs somewhat difficult to write.”

So, if simple programs do not tell you enough, you need something a little harder. For some companies, if you pass an initial phone screen they may ask you to complete a programming assignment or it could even be the entrance criteria for the interview process. Recently, I saw one of these questions on JavaLobby:

By starting at the top of the triangle and moving to adjacent numbers on the row below, the maximum total from top to bottom is 27.

5
9 6
4 6 8
0 7 1 5

I.e. 5 + 9 + 6 + 7 = 27. Write a program in a language of your choice to find the maximum total from top to bottom in triangle.txt, a text file containing a triangle with 100 rows.

This is an interesting problem although it may not be entirely relevant to your future job. One issue with this type of programming question is that you do not see the thought process of the interviewee, and the problem could be too difficult for a 30-minute segment of an interview. So, you need to find something that could be completed within 30 minutes and give you a solid feeling for how competent a person is. One question I have run into that fits this nicely and does not require any domain knowledge is the following:

You have multiple lists of numbers that may or may not be sorted and need to be sorted into one large list. How do you do this?

In my experience, this problem takes anywhere between 15 and 30 minutes and it requires the person to write some code on a whiteboard. It is an interesting question for a few reasons:

it is definitely solvable within 30 minutes
it does not require advanced algorithmic knowledge like AI or machine learning
it can require code without being too extensive
it can lead to other talking points like performance and memory consumption.

The key thing to remember is that you need to be comfortable working with this person as well as being comfortable with their level of knowledge. Finding the appropriate level of detail and complexity in interview questions is like a dark art. Some people figure it out after years of study and refuse to tell you their secrets.

Quick Note: RegularGeek Having Email Problems

Rob Diana — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 12:54:22 +0000

I just wanted to let people know that RegularGeek is having email problems. It looks like I have only been getting part of my emails for the past week to 10 days. So if you emailed a regulargeek.com address, please be patient as I try to sort things out. I just received a batch of emails this morning that looks like it might have caught itself up, but I will be looking into the problem to ensure the delays do not continue.

I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused anyone.

RegularGeek Most Talked About Posts of 2009

Rob Diana — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 13:05:59 +0000

Last year, I wrote about the ten most talked about posts of 2008 on this blog, and I figured it would be a good idea again for 2009. This list contains the posts with the most number of comments. Some of these are the same as those with the most page views, but some are not. So, please take a look at these posts that you may have missed. One minor point is that last year’s list only had 3 posts with more than 20 comments. As you can see below, the conversation has increased in the past year, which is a good sign for growth. Another neat tidbit is that the top post is currently on the top 15 posts of the past 365 days in the Digg Programming section. You will notice that the list has 17 posts. This is because there is a tie for #15, and I could not find a clean breaking point for 20.

(152) What Programming Language Should I Learn?
(37) Sorry Twitter, Facebook Is The Data Gold Mine
(30) Like It Or Not, Twitter Is Becoming Infrastructure
(29) Subscriber Counts Now Mean Nothing
(27) Why Did Intuit Buy Mint?
(26) Yet Another Call For A Federated Twitter
(24) Is The Real Time Web A Solution In Search Of A Problem?
(24) RSS Is Not Dead, It Has A Usability Problem
(24) Are We Following The Wrong People?
(23) FriendFeed Is Getting Ripped Off
(21) Google Makes A Bid To Control The Internet
(21) RSS, Human Filters And Real Time Streams
(19) Twitter Biting The Hand That Feeds It
(17) Has Google Gone Evil?
(16) Why Did Facebook Buy FriendFeed?
(16) Google Wave Redefines The Rules
(16) Status Updates Are Not Conversation

Happy 2nd Birthday Regular Geek

Rob Diana — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 14:19:00 +0000

It was two years ago today that I started this blog and it feels like ages ago. I am not sure if year 2 was more interesting than year 1, but the blog has been a lot of fun. Also of note, this is post 299, so in a few days I will be at 300 posts as well. So, what were the top 10 posts for this year?

What Programming Language Should I Learn (This post was almost 50% of all traffic this year)
8 Sites To Help You Find The Perfect Product
Why Did Intuit Buy Mint
Sorry Twitter, Facebook Is The Data Gold Mine
Tools For Unit Testing Java Web Applications
Why Do You Write Code
What Programming Languages Do Jobs Require
The Social Network Business Plan, Strategies From David Silver
FriendFeed Is Getting Ripped Off
Status Updates Are Not Conversation

Three posts from 2008 had a very strong showing this year as well:

Obviously, the question is how are we doing now and how does that compare to last year. For the basic blog statistics, last year my posts were fairly long compared to what pro-bloggers say you should do:

Months Blogging: 12
Posts Per Month: 12
Words Per Post: 697
Total Words In Posts: 90672

My total statistics at the end of year two show that I did not learn my lesson and actually wrote much longer posts:

Months Blogging: 24
Posts Per Month: 12.4 (154 posts this year)
Words Per Post: 777 (914 words per post this year)
Total Words In Posts: 231402 (140,730 words this year)

The other side of the blog statistic picture is the external statistics. Last year, the blog had some nice growth and decent subscriber numbers:

Technorati Authority:95
Technorati Rank: 51898
Feedburner: 578 subscriptions
Google Page Rank: 5

This year things have changed dramatically due to some changes in these services. Technorati changed their authority numbers as well as how they rank blogs. Now, the Technorati numbers are more of a relative score compared to the top blogs. Feedburner started to include FriendFeed subscribers in their counts, so those numbers look wildly different as well:

Technorati Authority: 518 (613 in Info Tech)
Technorati Rank: 4100 (99 in Info Tech)
Feedburner: 3800 subscriptions (1705 from FriendFeed, so about 2100 compared to last year)
Google Page Rank: 5

Obviously, the blog has grown considerably and I have all of you to thank. Several of the readers here share links on Google Reader and Twitter heavily, and that has really spurred the continued growth of the blog. Thank you to all of you. I also make no promises about what will happen next year either, so no promises of more programming or less programming. I will also not make promises about making my posts shorter, I have long ago given up the fight against verbosity. You will have to live with me taking 400 words to get to the point of the post for a while longer

Last Chance To Donate To DonorsChoose

Rob Diana — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:33:48 +0000

I have been slacking on my updates on the DonorsChoose.org progress and it is almost too late. The Social Media Challenge ends this weekend. This is your last chance to donate to the cause! Go to the RegularGeek giving page and throw in a $10 donation or whatever you can afford.

If you go to the Giving Page, on the right side you will see the impact our donations make. Currently, we have donated $212 and helped 420 students. I am very thankful that you have decided to help, but this is the last chance to donate in the challenge. At this point, we are tied for 11th place in the tech blogs, and I would like to move up a few spots. However, this is not about how we finish in the standings, it is about helping children in lower income schools.

So, if you can find a way to donate a few dollars, go to the giving page and find a project to support. If you don’t like the projects I have chosen, feel free to donate to any project. The donation is the important part.

Thank you all for your support.

More From RegularGeek on WorkAwesome.com!

Rob Diana — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 12:58:44 +0000

I do not write guest posts as much anymore, and I do not contribute to other sites too often. So, when it happens, I like to let you know. First, if you are not reading WorkAwesome.com, you absolutely should be. It is a new blog from the Envato network that is meant for people in an office or people who just want to get better at what they do:

WorkAwesome is a resource for the worker. It’s a blog for people who want to be awesome at work. It’s also a blog for people who want to find work, or simply quit work. Whether you need to know how to make a kick-ass PowerPoint presentation or survive the office Christmas party (hint: stay away from the CEO’s flirtatious wife), we’ve got it.

Given that I have worked in cube farms for most of my career, and there were not many resources for the office worker, I wanted to contribute. So, my post went live yesterday! Take a look at Balancing Work And Social Media Addiction and make sure you take a look at the rest of the site too. Here is the first part of the post:

So, you have a normal 9 to 5 job. You are also addicted to social media like FriendFeed, Twitter and the rest. How do you balance your activities so nothing really suffers?

The first thing you must do is figure out what type of commitment you want to make to your social media sites. You can pick a few of your favorite social sites to focus on. If your day job is sitting in a cube or corporate office somewhere, then you will need to limit your activity in some way. If you want to be like Robert Scoble or Louis Gray, you will have to give up some sleep to stay active on several sites.

If you want to read more, just head over to Balancing Work And Social Media Addiction.