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One of the points of technical interviews is to find out how someone solves a problem. Usually that problem is one that the interviewer knows the solution to and wants to see the interviewee arrive at a similar (or perhaps, more impressive) solution. This means the interviewer, under the auspices of pairing with the interviewee, basically sits back, evaluates, and trys to prod the interviewee forward rather than interacting with them in a normal way. ...

For the last 3 years I’ve worked full-time remote from home in my lovely Cloffice. I find working from home to be a relatively rewarding experience and I find that I am still able to get a lot done (even with 4 home-schooled kids around). Along the way I’ve learned some life hacks to working better with a 15 second commute. Work when you’re effective One of the biggest benefits of working from home is that you have a lot more control over your hours. If you work best at 5am, you don’t have to wake up at 3:30 to get ready and get going. If you work best at 9pm, you can still have a life and not be looked down upon for not being in your office chair from 9-5. Figure out when you work best and then work those hours. Have lunch away from your desk (with your family if you have one) I have lunch with my kids nearly every day. Sometimes I have meetings during that time and have to eat at my desk, but those are the exception and not the rule. Get dressed, have a shower. There’s some powerful psychology at work when you dress well even though you could be on an important conference call in Pajama bottoms. Showering and getting dressed does some positive things for your psyche and cues you in for the day. Let your family interrupt you (but have an indicator for when they should try not to) You are working from your home. Your family is there and loves you (much more than your coworkers, in all likelihood) – spend time with them. When your kids ask you for 5 minutes of your time… give it. When your spouse needs something done, do it. Enjoy that time. But also, when you need focused time, have a signal that is clear to them (a closed door, headphones on, a sign on your wall, etc) that they can see and not be rejected by you. Let them see that you need time to focus and then make the call to determine how important what they need is. This requires some mutual cooperation, but can be very rewarding if you can strike the balance. Don’t read e-mail first. It’s tempting to read your e-mail first to slide into the day… but if you can resist it, start with a difficult task and move on from there. E-mail will still be there, but if every day is eaten up by the tyrrany of the urgent, you’ll never get anything done.

There are lots of things you can do to your developers to make them better. You can send them to conferences, you can review their code, you can let them pair with co-workers and peers, you can give them hard problems that require creative thinking. You can also let them in on the business side of things. When you let your developers help make business decisions, they not only become better developers, they also become more valuable to the organization and more able to make solid, trustworthy decisions. ...

After a few weeks of working on the Ergodox, I’ve finally found what I believe is an ideal layout. But that’s for me. You’ll be different. You’ll think of things differently. You’ll have different needs. You’ll hate where my spacebar is, or my curly braces… and that’s exactly what the Ergodox is for. It’s not only ergonomic in the sense that you do not strain your fingers to reach keys around them, but it is also ergonomic in the sense that you can place keys where they make sense. You could literally come up with your own keyboard format–though I certainly wouldn’t suggest it. ...

Back in August, I ordered an Ergodox from MassDrop - Cherry MX Blues, an aluminium top plate, and hardware programmable keyboarding was in my future. It took a long time for it to get here. Plagued by problems in their supplychain, MassDrop finally got all the pieces together around December, and shipped them off to be assembled for those of us who didn’t want to try their hand at sauldering. It finally showed up on my doorstep last week–though I was so excited that I met the UPS guy in my driveway. ...

Last weekend I participated in the Global Day of Code Retreat here in Austin. I was impressed at the diveristy of participants, the overall good nature of those there, and what I was able to learn even while pairing with relative beginners. When I got there, there were 3 women and 3 men in the room. By the end of the day there were about 6 women and 10 men. At least 6 of the participants grew up in foreign countries. It was, for a computer meetup on a Saturday, a fairly diverse crowd. I was impressed. ...

Pairing is hard, but to me, the hardest part about remote pairing is not technology or even logistics, it’s collaboration and problem solving together. To that end, there are multiple pairing styles that are worth looking at when you’re trying to pair with someone knew. Each style facilitates collaboration differently and knowing how they work helps. Driver / Navigator Fundamental Idea One partner “drives” at the keyboard, focusing on implementing. The other partner “navigates” verbally, focusing on big ideas, questions, typos, and conventions. ...

As developers, we have a tension that we almost always deal with, the tension between writing the best possible solution and the fastest possible solution. Usually we end up somewhere between them, sacrificing a bit of quality for speed. I’ve yet to hear of a developer that would say they sacrificed a bit of speed for quality–but isn’t that what we want to do? For myself, I’ve always struggled with this balance. What we want is to continually improve quality and deliver features quickly and readily. Can we do both? ...

There are lots of skills a developer has to have, but one of the ones you really need to have if you ever want to make a living is being able to interview well. There are lots of things that make interviewing a challenge, but if you interview well you’ll learn something at the least and get a job offer at the most. Let’s talk about how to interview well. ...

A New Way to Level Up? A few weeks ago at LSRC, Katrina Owen mentioned exercism.io as a site she set up for people to go learn new things, get feedback and head toward better code. I was intrigued. I have always loved small, easily finishable exercises that allowed me to think about things OTHER than the exercise itself. I tried a few and quickly became hooked. But the thing that really surprised me was not just how hooked I was on leveling up on the exercises, but how hooked I was on reading other people’s code and providing feedback on it. It was fascinating to see how many different ways someone else solved the same little problem. Little differences like naming to big differences like Functional vs. OO approaches to problems become easy to evaluate. It also becomes clear where certain solutions shine and where they don’t. ...