The Guerilla Guide to Interviewing

[Martin]

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html

Hell, just read http://www.joelonsoftware.com/

Good things to know. Yes wtd, I stole this site from you, but this was too good to pass up.

Quote:

Some signs of a good programmer: good programmers have a habit of writing their { and then skipping down to the bottom of the page and writing their }s right away, then filling in the blank later. They also tend to have some kind of a variable naming convention, primitive though it may be... Good programmers tend to use really short variable names for loop indices. If they name their loop index CurrentPagePositionLoopCounter it is sure sign that they have not written a lot of code in their life. Occasionally, you will see a C programmer write something like if (0==strlen(x)), putting the constant on the left hand side of the == . This is a really good sign. It means that they were stung once too many times by confusing = and == and have forced themselves to learn a new habit to avoid that trap.

Some good advice right there. I should start doing that.

[Andy]

sweeet.. i knew couldnt be the only one that did that bracket thing.. me proud of me self.. but yea the == thing is pretty smart...

[MysticVegeta]

eh.. I do the bracket (mostly 'end for') things too.. but dont need to do the constant thingy because "=" = "==" in turing, haven't really gotten used to it in Java and C++.

But its a cool article.

[Andy]

their summer internthing is amazing... im gona apply for it muwahah.. hopefully they'll take fall term too

[codemage]

Very informative & intelligent.
Thanks for the post.

[Hikaru79]

Andy wrote:

their summer internthing is amazing... im gona apply for it muwahah.. hopefully they'll take fall term too

That same company released a DVD documentary about four interns that they took in over the summer. They decided to break tradition and give this group of interns their own project that they had to do on their own, from the ground up. And they filmed it. You can watch it to see exactly what working for these guys is like

[Andy]

yea i read that.. no time tho.. ati work co ops like dogs

[Hikaru79]

Andy wrote:

yea i read that.. no time tho.. ati work co ops like dogs

All the more reason why you should jump in to work at Fog Creek

[bugzpodder]

heh well, one of the MS guys tried to play devils advocate with me. Normally, I'd have just listened to him without disagreeing because i wont usually take time to think about it if he says is right. But it just so happens that day I was pretty slow, so i replied with 3 or 4 "Huh?" and he finally gave in and said he was just trying to trick me. hew!

[md]

How true that article is... at least at UW you do move beyond Java after second year for the most part. Even then... aside from some cs13* classes it's only using Java because it can be made to run on many different underlying computer systems... I think... writing a compiler in Java is seeming to be a dumb idea so far though.

[rizzix]

No actually writing a compiler in Java is a cool idea. Then there's no worry about porting the compiler later on. Java's own compiler is written in java.

In fact Java has one of the more advanced compiler compilers: SableCC.