Originally posted on 2019-10-29 as an email:

#articles

Such a lonely day, and it’s mine. The most loneliest day of my liiiiiiiiifeeeee.

Hey there cool kids! Some of you are probably young enough to not recognize that reference! 

You know who else is young?

Quantum fucking supremacy! While that would make an awesome name for a CERN metal band (we actually have plenty), I’m mostly impressed not by Google’s achievement, not by IBM’s swift rebuttal, but by something else: That site’s cookie policy box size.

Bah, I’m riding on a tangent there. It’s been a wild week, as some of my projects have been kicking back into high gear and I’m currently undergoing some interviews that I should probably be sleeping to save energy for. Anybody looking to practice some coding in an awesome team and a safe environment? Hit me up! In the meanwhile, I just need some space…

And I’m not even the only one

Elon clearly isn’t getting enough space and not for luck of trying! But alright, enough with the wordplay. Let’s get to some useful stuff:

- Wise tweet of the week - The guy who created TDD helps us get tests right - Web design in 4 minutes? - Oh hi Mark

And Tech radars: What are they?

Tech Radars are nifty little things that people who usually call themselves Code Architects sometimes create. Now don’t get me started on those people, but I definitely respect their work. Tech radars are maps of software where industry experts plot their (opinionated) views on what is good software to use and what is not. The most popular ones are by Zalando and Thoughtworks. It is good to drop by these from time to time - they can guide you on what people in the industry would like to be doing. Closer to the core is always better. Something being in the radar in a bad position (such as hold) is still better than not being on the radar.

Use radars to evaluate the pulse of the enterprise. Get an idea of the technologies they’re using and adopting, their methodologies. Playing out with some of those tools is a sure way to strengthen up your CV. 

Second topic of the week: Tech interviews!

I recently went through 2 of them, for some fancy schmancy companies in Amsterdam. While they were both very interesting, they represented very different approaches to interviews.

  • Booking.com: 75 minutes, 4 algorithmic exercises, all in Hackerrank. Hackerrank is actually a pretty legit platform and I trained a fair amount of Java skill on it back in the day.

  • Everon: 5 days to complete, 1 backend API to implement, expected 4H of time investment.

These are the most stereotypical tasks you will get as a starting junior developer. Especially in the Java world, or going for any Backend position, the second one is very standard. The first one is kinda more general. I absolutely despise it personally, because it’s asking me to code:

  • Under unrealistic time pressure
  • With ridiculous constraints (don’t use Google? Really? How do you think I fucking code?)
  • Focusing on arbitrary objectives (runtime complexity stopped being relevant at the third year of university tbh)
  • and following bad principles (Not providing documentation, not writing tests, not writing clean code)

Apparently despite my hatred towards it, I scored well enough that they invited me for an interview! But that doesn’t make that shit any better.

On the other hand, I loved the backend task. I spent approximately 16 hours on it, mostly during night, trying out different things and building a nice, complete application. I even packaged the deliverables in Kubernetes! There’s many, many important points that I came across and you can find all of it:

  • my final project
  • the exact task description
  • and my narration of this journey

in this repo. I definitely recommend reading the readme there, it’s, I feel, fairly educational.

So yeah, it’s been a fully week. I hope y’all are holding up well and that you applied for CERN if you had the chance! 

Until next time…

Stay cool, kids! Alexander P.