Based on my recent job market experience, I’m happy to report that esoteric algorithm interviews seem to be on the decline. Below I describe six other, better coding interview formats. LeetCode-style interviews are bad. You can tell that engineering interviews are broken because there is a burgeoning industry that’s sprung up around interview prep…

I’m gearing up to apply for my next engineering job by reviewing some classic algorithms and implementing them in Ruby. Quicksort is a recursive algorithm for sorting lists of values. I won’t recapitulate the details of how quicksort works here. This explanation from Khan Academy is good. I used the JavaScript implementation developed in that course as the basis for my own. This post is for folks who write Ruby and want to see what an idiomatic Ruby implementation of quicksort might look like. In particular, I’ve eschewed the overly terse single-letter-variable salad you so often find in example implementations of basic algorithms.

On a lark, I built a website that does nothing more or less than report the number of people who are currently on that very website: heylookat.us FAQ What does this site do, exactly? The number is how any people are currently on the site. That’s…it? Yes. Ok but why…

The making of Good Dogs of NYC, a Twitter bot about real doggies — 🎉 I’ve launched a new Twitter bot that tells the stories of all of the very good dogs who live in New York City. The data the bot uses originates from a ~90k row CSV of dog licensing data obtained from the city of New York via a FOIA…

Ruby’s algorithm for finding the definition of a constant is more complex than you might think. — The other day, I was doing some refactoring in the Rails CMS that serves thriveglobal.com. We allow our editors to toggle several boolean attributes on stories—starring them, flagging them, etc.—and we’d DRY’d up the controllers for these attributes by subclassing them to an abstract controller, StoryBooleansController:

The Case for a Pronoun for a Programmer. — In computer programming, time zones are famously tricky to work with. Antarctica has a lot of timezones. That’s all the context you need to understand why this tweet I posted struck a nerve with computer nerds: The tweet started to get some traction, and soon I received this question:

(Shhh! This seal is writing good code.) A Good Engineer is a Lazy Engineer The customer care manager at my company was hiring for a position that involved responding to customer emails. As part of the application process, she asked candidates to respond to a sample customer complaint. One applicant submitted a response that sounded oddly familiar…