Marco's Stream

How to test WP7’s UX…without having a WP7

How cool is this? A HTML/JS-based demo of how a WP7 device works. You can check out the home menu and apps list, and many of the built-in apps (Calendar, Pictures, Messagging, Outlook, …)

Pitfalls to avoid for developers doing job interviews

I’ll be talking about tips, not tricks, so don’t expect to learn easy ways to pass an interview. The best way to get a job you want is to deserve it! And work/study to get there. No shortcuts.

1. I ask you “Do you already know what we do here?” and you say “No”? So, we have a website named after our company name (it couldn’t be easier to find), there are dozens or hundreds of other sites mentioning our names together with our products…and you don’t know anything about what we do? You didn’t spend event 5 minutes on Google trying to find out something? I guess working with us is not that important for you after all, isn’t it?
   
   => TIP: discover as much as you can about the company that interviews you, about their products, and possibly about their key people.
   
   
2. You’re interviewing for a position of Senior Web Developer, and you don’t know what AJAX is? I mean, not how to do cross-site AJAX calls with JSONP, or not the precise list of jQuery’s Ajax method, what “what Ajax mean and what it is used for”! You must have lived in a cave for the last 5 years or more, without internet, magazines and books, right? There are things that you cannot ignore…it’s like interviewing for a position of an Italian-language teacher, and just know what “pasta” and “panino” means because you went to holiday in Venice!
   (Btw, this example and everything else in this article is from true job interviews; another one on the same line was a candidate for an Senior SQL Server DBA position who didn’t have a clue about what a clustered index is)
   
   => TIP: even if you’re interviewing for a Junior Dev position, or for an internship, ensure you know well at least all the basic concepts important for that job. For some positions you might not be required to have working experience, but knowing and understanding what a technology does is a matter of spending a few hours or days reading some programming websites or a couple of high-level magazines. If you want that job, it’s not a huge investment.
   
   
3. I ask you something that you don’t know, and you try to invent some answer, even if you don’t have a clue about what I asked, or maybe just remember very very little of something you read time ago. Avoid that! You can be sure that the interviewer knows pretty well the topic they asked you about, and there’s no way you can fool them around with bullshit! It might be ok that you don’t know the answer, it might have been a complex question, the just-in-case-you-happen-to-know-it question that would earn you some extra point, but not a very important one; so just be honest and say you don’t know it.
   
   => TIP: if you don’t know something, admit it keeping self control and without becoming nervous; you must show confidence in yourself even when you don’t know something!
   If you think it’s something that you can guess with the knowledge you have in other fields, you might try that, but be sure to mention that you’re not sure and that you’re just making a supposition.
   
   
4. It’s ok to be flexible and desire to learn different technologies and do different things in your work. However, if I ask you “What would you prefer to do, developer or sysadmin?” and you say “it’s ok either way”, it really sounds like you’re desperate enough to do any job. And being “desperate enough” is not a good sign to prospect employer. Or it might mean that you aren’t passionate about being a dev or a sysadmin specifically, which is even worse because you won’t study and work hard to improve your skills.
   
   => TIP: understand what you want to do, focus on that, and go to job interviews with a clear idea to express.
   
   
5. Sometimes you’re so sure about the answer you give to a question, that you might be tempted to respond in bad ways if they tell you you’re wrong. Resist! You might have simply misunderstood the question, your interviewer might actually be wrong, or you might be wrong.
   
   => TIP: be confident in your answers, but only if you think you’re really correct and not if you’re just trying to fake an answer. Even if you’re sure about your answer, don’t insist to much, since there’s always the possibility that you’re actually not. Never, never, never be arrogant, and always assume that your interviewer knows more than you about the things he asks. (this might not be true, but you assume it, just in case…)
    
6. You tell me you’ve designed the architecture of this super cool and super complex system; I ask you to describe with more details the architecture and the different pieces of software that make up the system, and you start saying “mmm….ehmm….well….right now I don’t remember it very well”. That is very very bad, and it makes me suspicious that you’ve simply exaggerated your role in the project…and maybe everything else you told me so far.
   
   => TIP: be ready to describe in details your past works, so spend some time before the interview to revisit them, looking at the specs and docs, doing a few quick runs to remember what the apps do, etc. If you’re a mobile dev and developed cool mobile apps, bring them with you on your smartphone, and show them off live…explaining what they do and how they work will be much more easier!
   
   
7. Most employers, at the end of the interview ask you if you have any question, and you say “No?”. So I guess you don’t care what projects/products the company develops? You don’t care which specific projects you’d be working on? Don’t care if you’d work on consulting or on internal projects (for companies that do both things)? Don’t care about the methodologies used by the company to manage teams and projects? Don’t care about the size and composition of typical teams inside the company? Don’t care about the background or your possible co-workers? Then you probably don’t care about the job.
   
   => TIP: show interest about the job and company, asking questions to know more about how things work in that place.
   
   
8. It seems like everybody say in their resume “I am very passionate about technology”…yet they only know Java, PHP or some other very common language studied in college or used at previous jobs. In my mind this doesn’t show great passion. Passion means you keep up-to-date on your own, read books or blogs, do some pet projects, go to community meetups…any of these. It’s not that you must think about computers and work 20h/day, be a nerd and don’t have a life. But there’s a balance between that and working 9-17 and then forget everything until next morning.
   
   => TIP: if you write you’re passionate about your work, be ready to demonstrate it, even at the interview. If you’re not, and work is just work for you, just don’t mention it in the CV. It’s not a rule to insert it.
   
   
9. Unfortunately, at some companies you could end up doing the same stuff and working with the same technologies for years and years. Ok, you might just quit and search something more interesting, but sometimes you just cannot afford to do that. In that case, many people do something in their own time, trying to develop small things with new technologies just for fun, writing their experiments on a blog, or even just going to events and meetups. All this doesn’t properly go under “work experience” but you should definitely mention that (in both the CV and during the interview), because it has big value, and intelligent interviewers will recognize that. However, be honest and be ready to demonstrate what you say…otherwise you’ll fall into the trap of the previous point.
   
   => TIP: mention everything you’ve experimented and studies outside of work/office, as it will probably make a good impression. However, don’t exaggerate and don’t say you know something just because you read an article about that.
   
   
10. Going to a job interview wearing shorts and a t-shirt isn’t the best way to present yourself. If you apply at a software house, you can pretty safely guess that the employees are not forced to wear suits and ties all days…they are not lawyers after all, no? However, being sloppy and untidy makes a bad impression, and make you look unprofessional.
    
    => TIP: wear casual to feel at ease, but be sure to be tidy and look professional…like someone that is at work and not playing games with friends.

Reminders in iOS5

Until 5 minutes ago I had been considering iOS5’ Reminders app as a simple Todo list with the ability to set alerts at a specific date/time. This was not particularly appealing to me, since I already use Google Calendar for that and it integrates perfectly on the iPhone; I just set up an appointment or thing-to-do on Google from my desktop PC, the phone syncs with it, and it alerts me at the right time.

I just found out something cool that the Reminders app adds to this though: you can set up a new todo thing so that the phone alerts you according to your location…namely when you arrive at a certain place (e.g: arrive home) or leave it (e.g: leave the office). Pretty nice!

Job interview tip

Having a photo of yourself on the toilet (in your public Facebook galleries) doesn’t make you shine in the eyes of a recruiter…

Balance the importance of design patterns

Knowing the GoF’s book by heart doesn’t make you a good software architect, and some people definitely overvalue design patterns.

On the other hand, knowing what a Singleton is and how to implement it should be required to be hired as a software developer!

Tumblr or Facebook?

Also considering to stop using Facebook except for replying to friends’ posts or writing a thing or two in Italian from time to time

New to Tumblr

Looks like I’m unable to keep a personal blog…no time (and no interest) for writing long posts. After reading this Mashable post, I thought I’d try this Tumblr thing…