Welcome to my PinkLetter. A short, weekly, technology-agnostic, and pink newsletter where we cultivate timeless skills about web development.
My Ramblings This Week
In a previous PinkLetter, I suggested you should apply for a job.
This week, I failed a technical interview.
The exercise was a simple kata, which I should have aced. So no excuses there!
What surprised me was how unrealistic the interview was: I was left alone with a problem to solve, a timer running, and a person looking over my shoulder in complete silence.
A silly mistake of mine made a few tests red. I thought I'd have a chance to debug but was told that was it.
I had a ton of fun, to be honest. I felt like I was streaming a live coding session: I was trying to entertain with my pink hat and the pride background, shared a few tricks here and there, and got a problem that was the right level of challenging to get in the zone.
But software development is a team effort; this is why I'm not a huge fan of strict technical interviews. Especially because I think we would have killed it had we pair-programmed.
I refuse to accept I made such a silly mistake. You bet I'm giving this another shot!
Elsewhere on the Web
Hyperproductive development by Jessitron
Let’s talk about why some developers, in some situations, are ten times more productive than others.
hint: it isn’t the developers, so much as the situation.
ShortcutFoo was created by programmers for programmers in an attempt to make learning your editor fun, easy, and effective. Akin to the days of first learning how to type on a keyboard, shortcutFoo aims to help programmers accomplish more in less time and with fewer keystrokes.
You have written your first application in Elm. Congratulations my friend, the hard work has finally paid off. Now it’s time to relax and enjoy the pure bliss that is maintaining and refactoring Elm code.
But wait a second, someone tells you the app feels a bit sluggish to use. Mh. I thought that writing pure functions would automatically make code fast. Okay. Let’s try to stay calm.