HTCW Podcast

[@Wineblood]

I'll try a lengthy comment to answer to the questions Peter asked at the end here. Starting with the "are you a senior, junior, or not a developer yet?" question: I'm technically a senior developer. I've been coding professionally for about 10 years now but I feel like a junior most days, there's a lot I still don't understand with the tech stack at my current job and that's why I don't feel like a senior yet. But I have been doing this for a while now and when it comes to the areas I'm more familiar with, it's very comfortable and I can get through a fair amount of work/code/tasks. Moving on to the interview style questions. 1. Give an example of when you disagreed with a colleague regarding a programming setup or a programming solution. - This is one that came up last week and I've had a few times, I like regexes for validation and it seems like other developers don't like them. In the most recent case, there wasn't much push back, but the alternate suggestion was a function with nested if statements and that feels like reinventing the wheel for just checking strings. 2. Describe the most stressful situation you faced during your software development career and explain how you handled it. - In 2019, I had a mostly remote job that initially required me to commute to the office once a fortnight. Unfortunately, that's a 4+ hour journey from where I live with an overnight stay, so the logistics of it were not enjoyable. I spoke to my manager once I passed probation and reduced it to something much less frequent and due to being the only one quite far from the office, I ended up being the odd one out in that job. As there wasn't an easy way to resolve that, I ended up quitting that job. 3. Give an example of when you improved upon a programming solution or process by making it more performant. - In my first job, I was tasked with improving the efficiency of one of our more costly parts of the system. By using profiling tools, I was able to pinpoint functions that were being called thousands of times, due to being in nested for loops, and trim small amounts off the execution time. I was also able clean up some of the technical debt that had accrued over time. Overall, this led to enough of a performance increase that we were able to bring the number of nodes down. 4. Have you ever missed a deadline? What would you do differently and what was the outcome? - Luckily I have never had a missed deadline that was important enough to remember. I miss "deadlines" (sprint goals) quite often and the teams I've been in recognise that estimates still have a fair amount of uncertainty and that it's only from doing the work that we can find the extra work/complexity in the task. What I try to do is try to push towards smaller tasks, where the scope and requirements are very well defined. If a deadline is missed, we at least have previous units of work done and deployed, and partial functionality was delivered as opposed to all of the work being "mostly done". 5. How would you explain a technical industry term to someone from a different industry? - I give a brief description of the term as I would give to a technical person then explain the terms I used very simply in order to provide a basic understanding of term I'm trying to explain relies on. I'd then try to briefly explain the functionality and/or benefits of the term in question. Using the MVC example, I'd explain model, view, and controller, then talk their scope and how breaking the problem down that way is now well established and low risk.

[@howtocodewell]

Hey, those are brilliantly well thought out answers. I can tell that you’ve had a lot of experience in this field. Nicely done