Programming interview preparation

I’m happy to announce my new project, Interview.Codes. I’ve been working a while on helping people pass programming interviews. I conduct interviews and see many of the problems people have. Reading what people post here, there’s a great deal of frustration with the process. I want to collect experiences, and expertise, and make it more pleasant for everybody.

I’m looking forward to having guest authors, and individuals share their experiences. Please contact me if you’re interested.

I don’t want this to read like an ad, so let me tell you about my ideas, what I’ve done, and where the project is going.

What it’s about

My site is to help you prepare for the interviewing process. This covers how to study in advance, how to talk during an interview, and even motivation -- even the best people fail often. I saw interest my articles on these topics and thought it’s worthwhile developing further.

Following the overview of my first course, the general themes I’m covering are:

• Communication during the interview
• Preparation for the interview
• Coding during the interview
• Learning key concepts about programming

I’ll cover this in a variety of ways:

• Articles
• Video classes
• Cheat sheets
• Shared experiences

The last point, “shared experiences”, is a vital topic. I’ve been in many interviews, on both sides of the table, but it’ll never be enough to rely on my experience alone.

If you have stories of your interview process you want to share, I’ll be happy to publish them. Letting others read these helps them when going for an interview. Knowing what a company’s process is like in advance, can ease tension and build confidence.

The Obvious

As I write articles, some of what I’m saying might appear obvious to you. That’s great. But I can assure you, coming from my experience as an interviewer, obvious things often escape the minds of candidates. I try to avoid quick judgements here, as there are many reasons one can get basic things wrong.

• A lack of experience in the interview process
• Not knowing which information is important
• Misreading the interview situation and mismatched expectations
• Nervousness and stress from the interview itself
• A lack of programming knowledge and experience

That’s part of my goal with the site. Preparation builds confidence. Confidence reduces stress and improves your abilities. Plus, appearing cool and collected helps the image you leave.

The Technology

I first mentioned the site in A Parade of Web Tech, where I say I’m using a hosted WordPress site. I think this option is the best... at the moment.

I’m serving mainly textual content, where the video courses will live off site for now. Long-term I might bring courses onto the site directly. For now, I want to focus on content, thus I will avoid technical overhead.

I write most articles in a markdown variant. This will migrate to my own document parser soon. I need a few solid days of work to add missing features and change my scripts.

I’ve ditched Grammarly and am playing with ProWritingAid. I like this new tool more as it makes less silly suggestions and gives more avenues for improving the text.

Someday, in the distant future, I look forward to having this integrated. Now I write in a text file, copy to the grammar tool, copy back to the text file, produce output, copy to WordPress, reproduce new output, copy to other site, etc. It’s a headache, but I don’t have another working solution.

Success

I’m looking forward to getting your feedback and stories on this project. I know that we’ve all been a victim to seemingly unfair processes. Having a community makes it easier to deal with failure, and makes it easier to succeed.