scmoore

Hi HN,

I am beginning a search for full-time employment, and I'm nervous about the technical interview. I'm looking for back-end web development work, and I'm wondering if there's a better interview prep strategy than the usual recommendations like Cracking the Coding Interview or online interview practice sites (interviewcake.com for example). They don't seem to be much related to the work experience I've had, but maybe that's just down to the jobs I've had.

What would you do to rapidly brush up on common interview questions for this kind of work?

Any thoughts appreciated!

I am a web apps developer with no CS degree, and much of my knowledge has come from self-directed study. I'm currently working in a place that doesn't have much focus on software craftsmanship as I understand it. My hand-wavy definition would be something like: an ongoing and management-endorsed effort to make the code easier to understand and maintain, and to make the developers better at writing such code. However I don't have a lot of experience to help me flesh out what this vision of better dev culture looks like.

I'm looking for a new job in the next few months (in Denver), and I'd really like to find somewhere invested in software quality, and in ongoing employee education. I try to study on my own but I feel like I would benefit much more from a mentoring relationship of some kind. So far my only thought has been to look for companies where software is part of the product, so as to stay on the profit-generating side of the books and at least have a chance to make a business case for ongoing training.

Do any of you have suggestions for finding companies like this? Do they exist, in any kind of numbers? Or am I asking for too much? Thank you.

I'm in my late 20s and I've been doing web development, back end mostly, for a couple of years.

I just moved back home to Virginia, where I've just started a new job at a university. I'm worried because it seems like a little bit of a backwater.

For example, there's no version control, and no bug tracking system (all requests made via email). I was told this was because it's such a small operation -- only two of us writing code. My boss doesn't seem to be resistant to those practices, but they're not implemented yet. The applications being built typically have very few users (maybe only a hundred or so). It's all ColdFusion, which I don't know much about. The pay isn't great but it's enough to live on and save a little.

There are some upsides. One is that I think I'll have a lot of free time and choice in how I spend it.

Later, I might be able to take advantage of steeply discounted tuition at the university. I don't have a CS degree and this one would be pretty cheap as they go.

How can I make the most out of a situation like this? Should I be looking for a more sophisticated workplace now, rather than sink time into this one? Should I hang on for the sake of the tuition? Or just loaf around drinking coffee and reading HN?

Also please let me know if I've left things out, I've tried to be brief.

Thanks!