songzme

It pains me to see another Coding Interview preparation tool. It's such a sad situation in the current industry.

Students learn to game the system to get a high paying job. Students who care about what they are working on will painstakingly try to perfect their projects. They don't have time to game the system and therefore have a hard time getting a coveted job.

Companies want to hire "the best" so they usually hire someone who can ace the company's interview. People who can ace the company's interview are usually those who studied for it.

I recently took over a codebase from an ex-employee who went to Google. People were happy for him but I am so indignant. His code caused me hell. One production bug after another led me to eventually throw out all of his code. His code was written by somebody who did not care and his tests were useless. I'm pretty sure during his time at our company he was focused on leetcoding so he could get somewhere better. I wanted to reach out to him on LinkedIn to give him a piece of my mind hoping it may make him a more responsible engineer but I decided against it. I focused on fixing the features for the users because it was the right thing to do.

I want to work with people who care about the product they are working on. People who care about building great products are not solving coding interview problems.

Game log is beautifully done, its an improvement from the real game itself. Good job!

OP here. A few self learners needed work experience on their resume so I mentored them to build an open source app that I think some developers may find helpful: https://garagescript.github.io/myProxy/

They finished and launched it. To showcase what it does, I used it to power freedomains.dev, a site I’ve been wanting to build for awhile to host my side projects during demos.

OP here. When I'm not at work I mentor self learners who are trying to become a software engineers. I thought it would be helpful for their learning to build and launch a tool that developers may find helpful.

OP here.

When I'm not at work I mentor self learners who are trying to become a software engineers. I thought it would be helpful for their learning to build and launch a tool that developers may find helpful.

> I would explain that what makes a startup promising, not just in the eyes of investors but in fact, is growth.

Growth is like cancer. Eventually a company will get big enough to bully others for the sake of growth.

Last night I had dinner with a friend who is building a (yet another) language learning app. Simple fact about language learning, or learning in general: You must practice almost every single day. Even if it is only 5-10 minutes.

PG himself said, if you don't die (aka give up), you will eventually succeed: http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html

To me, the best, most sensical way for learning applications to measure success is to delete user accounts with > 3 days of inactivity. This way you can measure the absolute effectiveness of your program. Students who stick through with your application should 100% become fluent. Target the users who actually want to learn, and measure your success by how many users you made successful.

"NO no no", he says. You'll have no users if you do that.

Been using a self hosted version of Mattermost for our students as a main form of communication and the markdown support is something I absolutely love. Thanks.

2 years ago I bought this vertex core 40% keyboard: https://mechanicalkeyboards.com/shop/index.php?l=product_det...

Unfortunately, I type in dvorak layout and the keyboard I purchased did not work out. I have to press 3 keys to type the letter 'z' because of the strange meta layers.

I switched to dvorak because I had minor wrist pains and I hoped that switching to dvorak would help. The pain went away (maybe a coincidence), but dvorak was a pleasure to type so I stuck with it.

Everytime there is a new keyboard, I try it out and become disappointed because it is heavily optimized for qwerty layouts.

I'm trying to document everything we teach here: c0d3.com/book

I teach underprivileged adults how to code. Most of them use old computers so I had them ssh into my server when they code so they don't have to install anything. When they learn about web development, whatever they built would be immediately available online under their subdomains that they could show off immediately to their friends and try on their phones.

The only drawback is that they had to learn and use vim to do their code editing. I tried to make their lives easier by setting every user with a default vim config, but the insert vs normal mode is a big hurdle for most students.

I'm glad visual studio code supports remote development, I'm hoping that means now my students can use it to ssh access my server and code there. Excited to try this out with new students.

The struggles of first world problems...

Every weekend my wife and I host a Meetup group where we teach people Korean. Yesterday a high school girl came and started crying everytime she was paired into a group exercise, constantly apologizing for how bad at Korean she was (which was totally okay with everyone, we have had students come who didn't know anything). I'm guessing that she had an anxiety attack. My wife and I felt terrible because we didn't know how to make her feel better or even sympathize with what she was going through. Eventually, her mom (who also attended) took her home.

This game definitely have me a little more perspective.

Unfortunately I don't have much to share because my setup is so simple. Literally just vim (you can find really awesome vimrc on GitHub, mines pretty messy), and tmux (simple apt install).

When I visit my friends place I usually just use their computer, otherwise I'll use my MacBook pro or desktop. I don't think about setup much, I just use whatever devices around me to access and write code on my server instance.

With our existing trend of moving everything to the cloud, I wonder why development environments aren't going in the same direction as well. It has so many benefits. I code on my digital ocean server (vim and tmux) and it gives allot of the benefits that netlify mentions like streaming live. If I don't have my computer I can just borrow anyone's computer (or use a public computer in the library) to make quick fixes or even implement features, all of which will be immediately live even if I log out of the system. If my laptop is lost or damaged, I just get a replacement and pick up exactly where I left off. With tools like react native, I can also dabble with mobile development in the cloud.

I have my own home server on a standard consumer Comcast internet (cheap plan at 60mbps) running c0d3.com, and the students that are learning how to code on it never had any issues with stability (except that one time where I had a power outage at home).

I also have my router configured to use our server as a DNS server and the speed is incredible. Since I'm hosting my sites at home, when people in my WiFi network use my sites it feels almost instantaneous (because network request resolves locally)

3 of my students were inspired to set up their own servers and they love the experience so far. Finding people who run their own services is so rare, I hope more people do it.

I am concerned about security implications though. Could people hack into my home server, then hack into the router, and then launch a man in the middle attack?

I just went through the 19-part interactive neural network and this is the best tutorial for beginners I've encountered. Each video is < 10 minutes and contains a practical example that motivated me to try implementing / prototype something quickly.

And doing all the examples directly on the browser creates a very low barrier to entry as a front end developer.

Yeah workout + water is a great combination

Yeah. 2 of those gallon bottles.

Learning how to smile. I would spend time in front of the mirror practicing my smile for different situations.

During interviews I would force myself to smile. It helped get rid of some nervousness. When I get stuck on a problem I would smile stupidly and usually the interviewer would help me out.

When I feel like conversations are getting heated I would take a step back and smile, it helps me direct the conversion to a more positive place.

Sometimes when stuff happens outside my control and life just sucks I'll force myself to smile and handle things to the best of my ability

During my interviews, I notice a profound difference in performance when I drank 2 gallons of water a day before the interview. I got out of those interviews thinking, How did I even come up with that solution? I pocketed a few offers and drinking water definitely played a pretty big role.

Now I drink 2 gallons of water every day, it's become a habit and I feel sharp every day.

X used to own a bookstore. It was good enough to put him in middle class. Then the culture changed, it was easier for people to read reviews online and buy, than to shop in book stores. His shop has to close down, now he drives for Uber and tries to make ends meet. He is no longer in middle class. Not homeless, but I'd imagine if there are more competition for unskilled labor, more people would be squeezed into homelessness

Could I recommend someone? I made a comment below about Mani, whom I met when I was volunteering at our local library.

Good news for op. I know a homeless developer who is not so lucky (yet?).

Emmanuel (we call him Mani) is a 50 (or 60?) year old homeless man who would smile and shake our hands every day when we showed up at our local library to hold coding hours. He came in to every single office hour from (4-8pm) to learn as much as he could and literally never missed a day in the 3 months pilot that we were there.

We learned from the librarians that for the past year, Mani has been coming to the library right when it opened (9am) and stayed until it closed (8pm) every day (including the weekend), trying to teach himself how to code. He was hoping to launch his website so he could make some money off ads. With a notepad++ on his usb drive, he coded every day piecing little things together. We taught him basic JavaScript and simple server stuff and helped him get his website up! https://newsgusher.garagescript.org/

Our office hours has ended, but Mani is still plowing away at the library. If you want to meet him, you can find him at Downtown San Jose Public Library on the third floor.

Rally anyone? I have a hard time getting used to it, and I've seen stories being worked on for the sake of being in rally even though there isn't enough information for good work to be done. I've seen engineers do good work to build features that the product needed but engineer was discouraged from doing it because it wasn't in rally first. And pointing sucks, we're trying to fill stories in just to meet certain point quota per Sprint.

I seriously wonder if OCD could be is created because of our lifestyle in society. Yesterday I went to a coffeeshop (creamery in SF) and there was this crazy bathroom where I had to scan a QR code to get in. The door automatically opened, I walked in, and it automatically closed behind me. When I washed my hands, the water faucet detects motion and it has a built in air dryer as well. When I'm done, I pushed a button and the door automatically opened.

Afterwards, I thought about why such a crazy bathroom was built and I realized that my entire bathroom could be done without me touching anything so I could keep myself clean. It made me think about all the germs in every bathroom door handle and all the hands touching it. If I didn't consciously stop myself, I could see myself becoming slight OCD.

At the same time, I wonder if someone who practiced true altruism would ever develop OCD. If I'm only focused on helping others without thinking about myself, would it be easier to let things go?

I'm not convinced that teaching kids how to code is a good idea, perhaps someone in hn could shed some light on how learning to code at a young age is a good thing. For me, important values to instill in a kid that will be conductive to their success as well as well-being are communication and empathy. The best way to achieve these is through diverse activities that involves teamwork and exploration. Rather than teaching kids how to code, sending them to be part of a sports team, band, and art group would be better choices. With these experiences interacting with people from different activities, the kid would grow up with more life experience and relate to others better, which translates to building more impactful products later on in life if they decide to pick up programming.

Unfortunately, I did not downvote you. I was trying to guess why someone would downvote your comment.

I sympathize with the author. My nonprofit is working with our local library to provide coding bootcamp for anyone who wants to learn (for free). We've been piloting for 3 months in San Jose and the whole experience has been very eyeopening to me.

One of our students, Mani, couldn't afford a laptop. He would go to the library when it opens to work on a website and hopes that he could one day make ad revenue. He was able to find books, borrow a laptop, and learn by himself. There are many people like him who finds solace in the library because it is one of the few places left that doesn't try to sell you something. At the library, they feel welcome.

In the past 3 months I've seen more diversity than I have ever seen in my career at Silicon Valley. People of all races and all walks of life come to learn and it was an amazing sight watching college students learn and teach alongside with adults making a career switch.

I love the library and what it represents: A non judgemental place that welcomes everybody to come learn. It would break my heart to see it become part of an organization that optimizes for profit margins. Here's the webarchive link to the original Forbes article: https://web.archive.org/web/20180722160053/https://www.forbe...

Because your statement is objectively wrong. Could you not see a scenario where people would experiment on her? Behaviorly/psychologically?

You are not alone. As the founder of garage script I've come across a few students who got a CS degree and couldn't find a job. The problem might not actually be your ability to solve algorithm, but rather your inability to communicate. For the students who came to me with similar situations, I had them lead coding sessions at our local library to help them get more comfortable with talking to strangers and they now all have a full time job. From my work experience as a tech lead, I've hired many people who didnt do well with algorithm questions but they were able to listen to my suggestions and get to an answer.

Maybe start a Meetup group and work through problems with other people?