War Stories and Job Interviews

I’ve sat on the other side of the table in a job interview. It’s not uncommon in companies for a member of the software team to evaluate a potential candidate, because it’s this team member who will be working everyday with this new person. It’s important that an actual team member gets to review a candidate and has a say in the hiring process.

One thing I’ve noticed about myself when interviewing others is that I enjoy good “war stories.” And by that, I mean I want to hear the candidate talk about how they overcame obstacles. I want to hear about crazy bugs and how they were on a mission to squash it. I want to hear about server faults and out of control garbage collections. I want to hear about this new library or language they’ve tried. I want to hear how they’ve grown. Did you overcome it? How did you overcome it? What would you have done differently? What did you learn?

I bet I’m not alone in this. I even bet other interviewers in other career fields feel the same way.

With the idea of war stories in mind, a friend of mine asked to review his resume. He has a background in doing QA work and was hoping to break into programming. The first thing I noticed right away, he placed all his QA work experience at the top and a list of his programming skills and projects at the bottom.

Why would you do this? Remember, he’s using this resume to break into software development.

It’s not uncommon for an interviewer to walk through a candidate’s resume. And in most cases, they start at the top and work their way to the bottom. If you put your non-job-related material at the top, you’ll be spending a good chunk of your interview explaining away how these bullet points are not directly related to the job you’re interviewing for. And by the time the interviewer gets to the good stuff at the bottom of your resume, it might be too late. The interviewer, in their mind, might have already written you off.

So my advice was to rearrange it, put the good stuff at the top, which also act as great lead ins to his own war stories. And that when he does, he should take every opportunity to talk about the cool stuff he’s done, even if it was on his own.

Think about it, you get about 30 to 45 minutes with an interviewer on average. You want to “eat that clock” talking about the great things you’ve done. Like a politician, you want to stay on message.

Nerdy Dads Teach Your Daughters Well

I don’t care if she’s a girl. I’m teaching my daughter how to make stink bombs and potato cannons. And about Star Wars.

The day Olivia was born I blasted the above statement on Facebook. My wife and I decided not to find out the gender, but other people around us believed Olivia was going to be a boy. So much so, the idea of a boy got into both our heads. And for me, like all fathers, I got into my head all the things I wanted to share with him. But the moment she was born her gender didn’t matter to me; I wanted to share everything I loved with her. Just think about it, a whole new person who never seen Star Wars!

But what really stuck with me was what a Facebook friend commented afterwards. She said:

If more nerdy dads shared there interests with their daughters, then maybe we would have more female engineers.

Update
A little explanation of the photos. The very top photos are some of the characters from Star Wars. I made these myself. I plan on using them when reading a novelization of Star Wars to Olivia. The second photo are what I call Baby Operating Systems. I also made these myself. They are the logos of the Operating Systems I’ve worked with. They are smaller, about the size of my hand. I’ve been thinking about using them as a mobile over the crib.

And Moms don’t worry about Dad making your kids too jock, too nerdy, too whatever. The time Dads spend with their kids, especially the girls, can’t be bought from the store.

Crazy. Insane. Holy Cow.

I am a lost for words. Today, my blog was promoted to the front page of wordpress.com. In particular, it was this story that made it’s way there around 1:30 PM Central.

I’m just shocked. I didn’t think much of the post and I wrote it mainly for myself. I’ve never had this many views before.

So for today, I’ve found myself suddenly popular.

Update 6:58 PM Central, March 23, 2012
15 views away from reaching 1000.

Update 2 7:17 PM Central, March 23, 2012
1000 views

Thoughts on “Waking Up at 5am to Code”

About a month or so ago, I stumbled across Matt Greer’s blogs post on Waking Up at 5am to Code. I loved reading the article and the idea. So, I did it for a week. I would wake up around 5am, stumble in my office, and begin coding for my project. And the at 6am, I would start the rest of day by getting ready for work.

Originally, I wanted to do it longer than a week and keep going, but I couldn’t keep it up. Though, my project got a lot of traction in that week, I felt sleep deprived. It didn’t help that I had a 5 month old in the other room, but still. And at work, I had trouble concentrating on the work to be done. So when Monday, rolled around again, I decided to reset my alarm back to 6am.

I still think this is a good idea, but only in spurts. I can’t see myself or anyone else doing this long term.

I feel the Don’t Break the Chain productivity method works for me. I don’t have a set time to do work, I just need to get my daily 3 tasks done sometime in the day. And so far, this has stuck with me.

Don’t Break the Chain

An old friend of mine shared this article from lifehacker. It’s describes Seinfeld’s productivity secret and describes an implementation of it.

If you don’t know, Jerry Seinfeld is a successful comic and TV actor. He rose to fame in the 90s. To stay creative and always be current, he would write his material and jokes every day. His secret to staying productive was to use a paper wall calendar as a way of motivating himself. After every writing session for the day was complete, he would go to his calendar and take a giant red marker and draw a big red X over that day. After awhile, this accumulates on the calendar. And he would see a chain of days that was productive and his goal from then on was to never break the chain. Once he skipped a day, he didn’t receive an X for that day and the chain would be broken.

The LifeHacker article describes an implementation of Seinfeld’s idea. I read this article 3 weeks ago and immediately tried my own version. Everything I did is pretty much the same, the only difference is that I decided to have only one calendar for all 3 tasks I want to do everyday. Whereas the author describes having a separate calendar for each task. For me, I didn’t like the idea of having to manage multiple calendars. So, if I did my 3 tasks for the day, that’s when I get to X my calendar. Also, I chose a green marker instead of red.

My three tasks to do everyday were (1) to practice piano, (2) code my personal project, and (3) write in my journal. My first attempt was on a Thursday, the day after reading the article. Thursday went fine. Friday went fine. But then the weekend came and I derailed. Then on Monday, I focused myself on recommitting to doing this. So far it’s stuck.

It’s crazy. Once you get a chain going, you never want to break it. I’ll be relaxing at the end of a long work day, on my couch, waiting to go to bed. And then it hits me that none of my tasks have been done. I’ll stop whatever it is I’m doing at the time and go get it done.

So far, my piano playing has improved. I’ve already noticed that I learn new tunes faster when I work on them everyday and not every other day. Or waiting for the weekend to hammer through the new music. As for my personal project, it is ahead of schedule. I even decided to put in extra features because of it.

This is the most productive I’ve felt in a long time and my chain is only two weeks long. I would suggest to anyone trying to work on some personal improvement to adopt this strategy in some form and see where it takes them.

Don’t break the chain…

Update March 13, 2012

One of the questions I’ve gotten about “don’t break the chain” is what to do when you’re traveling and one of your tasks is not possible? Do you break the chain or give yourself a reasonable “out” like the LifeHacker author describes.

I think this is where one has to modify the concept for their own needs and what they feel comfortable with doing.

For me, I’m currently traveling for work and how do I do practice my piano. Well like I said, I don’t want to break chain for anything if I can help it and I don’t want to use a vacation X when I don’t think of the time away from home as a vacation.

What I’ve done is packed up my sheet music and every night I do mental practice. In my hotel room or when during down time, I open to the songs I’m learning and slowly and methodically mentally work through the music. Imagining my hands touching the appropriate keys at the right time. Spelling out the chord notes to myself. Trying to go through the motions in my mind. Since this is all mental practice, it’s important to work through the music at slower tempo than what the performance speed is. I read through the music about half the speed I would normally play and sometimes slower if its a complete new piece.

For now, I’ll see what happens when I’m back home and find out if my jazz piano instructor notices a difference.

Anyway, this demonstrate the minimum that I’m comfortable with in not breaking the chain. For you and your daily tasks, it might be different.

Update 2, March 18, 2012

Well, I’m back home and had my piano lesson yesterday and it was the best one I’ve had in a long time. My piano instructor noticed marked improvement, despite the fact I only physically touched the piano 3 days of the week. The other four days was all mental practice. So for those four days I was away, I still earned my calendar X’s.

Books I’m Reading For 2012

Well, if you haven’t noticed in my book section of my blog, I list nothing for what I’m currently reading.
That’s because I decided not to read any tech books for 2012.

It seems in the past few years, I’ve been locked down on reading and studying. Not enough doing. It was like I was stuck in this endless cycle of going from one tech book to another. And walking around with this ever growing reading list of books I should read. Like somehow reading a large tomb of books will somehow magically transform me into a better developer. It’s not enough to read. It’s also important to do and to practice.

So for 2012, I’ve decided to stop reading tech books for awhile. I’ll still be reading other things, it’ll be refreshing to not be so absorbed in technical literature. And I’ll be focusing on building.

Update ( March 11, 2012 )
Today I stumbled across this Jef Claes blog post off of Hacker News. And I think it best describes what I was trying to convey in yesterday’s blog post. It’s nice to know there are others out there feeling the same way.

Java: Converting a List to an Array

For some reason, I always keep forgetting how to do this, without using a for-loop.

import java.util.ArrayList; 
import java.util.List; 

public class ConvertListToArray { 
 public static void main(String[] args) {
  ArrayList list = new ArrayList(); 
  list.add("test1"); list.add("test2"); 
  list.add("test3"); 
  String[] arrayOfStrings = convertListToArray(list); 
  for (String string : arrayOfStrings) { 
   System.out.println(string); 
  } 
 } 
 private static String[] convertListToArray(List list) { 
  return (String[]) list.toArray(new String[0]); 
 } 
}