Are you aware of the the Microbit?
It's used around the UK in schools - https://microbit.org/
352 karma · joined January 31, 2018
They've got a record for delivering as they've also made the Netduino a .Net version of the Arduino - https://www.wildernesslabs.co/netduino
We've interviewed developers who are amazing on paper, but can't answer simple questions that are mainly around enumerating a collection of integers.
I'd say communication is something we look for. Can you articulate why solution x is better than solution y? What are the compromises? Do you need to ask for more information?
So many candidates don't know an interview is an invitation to a conversation. You need to be able to engage with the people who are interviewing you. Ask questions to clarify if required.
The key advice I'd give developers is to be humble. I've met and worked with developers who are very talented, but also difficult to work with because of their personalities, we filter for this as a result.
http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/lasseter/
I remember seeing once that Pixar had a life size Cat-bus from Miyazaki's Totoro installed in their studios.
The original home movie DVD release of Spirited Away was also introduced by Lasster.
There was for a while a bit of confusion with independent coffee shops if they could sell it and make drinks with etc. -
https://unitedbaristas.com/blog/insights/2017/03/the-cascara...
I think it's been resolved, but I can't find much online about it.
At my current company we get them to write code (or something like pseudo code) down on paper. We give them a print out that clearly explains the task, which requires no domain knowledge and then leave them to it for an amount of time to write stuff down on paper. We then go back in the room and get them to talk us through their solution. But so many developers just can't do this.
Then some can, and they can't explain the edge cases, what if the array is empty? What if it's null? What if it's all the same value? They'll just freeze. They would have past the phone screen first to get this far.
We're not looking for more advanced stuff with red–black trees or an exotic data structure. Just a demonstration of what you've written and simple understanding.
In reality, this is an invitation to a conversation. Why did you do it that way? Is there another way to do it? Which way do you prefer? Why? All if this is basic first principle stuff.
Generally when you get to the good candidates you know. They can answer all these questions and you go in different directions with the questions, they're comfortable doing it too. You can get a technical conversation going. They won't lie and I say they can do X, the good candidates will quickly admit they haven't done X or Y, but their overall impression means not knowing X doesn't matter. The trouble is I've had so many candidates who are on the wrong end of the Dunning–Kruger effect.
[Minor grammar edits]
Why doesn't the Candy Japan Website have prominent links to Twitter and other social media?
Have you thought about using Social media more? Let's look at Twitter. Bemmu has almost 6,000 twitter followers, I'm guessing the Candy Japan Twitter account is @candyjapanese with about 250 followers?
While rivals - http://www.japancandybox.com/ has 23K follows and J-List has 155K followers.
One of the most annoying issues I have is with basic SMS from a non-iPhone user. The notification doesn't give me the sender's name, it just gives me their number, even though it's in my Contacts and I've just sent them an SMS. Not everyone I send messages to lives in an iMessage bubble or has WhatsApp or whatever. I've raised this as bug with Apple and they've flagged it as a duplicate. Many iOS updates later it somtimes it says [Maybe: <Person's Name>] as the notification. Why maybe? It never use to say that.
Sure you can use a language like TypeScript or one of the others that will transpile down to JavaScript giving you type safety, but you won't have the performance of web assembly. Although, I've yet to see what you'll need that performance for. A few of my co-workers are excited about it, but I've been pressing them, we don't need that level of performance on the SPA type stuff we write.
I think having web assembly will give you new avenues and use cases people haven't fully considered yet.
There are massive discussions with film photographers about the different kinds of films and their colour profiles, characteristics and so on.
I remember having a debate with another developer. He thought that an IP address started with 13 (13.X.X.X) was a generic internal IP address like 192.168.X.X.
At the time Xerox owned the whole 13. Address block.
You noticed that there were lots of young graduates, but also lots of old staff. With very few people in-between that age range. You'd then realise they'd get graduates and utilised them until they left. While the older staff generally got to a certain salary band, were satisfied and then stuck around until their generous pension could mature.
It was like working in a Dilbert strip with a huge amount of bureaucracy and process, with cargo culting thrown in. All the processes were internal to Xerox too and had acronyms prefixed with X as it was stuff like "Xerox Process Improvement Process".
At the other end of the scale the amount of research I heard about was amazing. They had numerous patients on e-ink displays way before ebooks like the Kindle came to market. But they never seemed to actually make something marketable apart from printers.
I remember being told about a room they had in the R&D labs (again 15 years ago) and it was all white boards. On the ceiling of the room was a camera that scanned all the whiteboards. You could write on the white boards a p in a square [P] and it would send the contents of that wall to the printer, or an e in a square then an e-mail address and it would then send it off as an e-mail instead.