4 ms·

Thanks for the post! Original author here. Happy to answer questions.

namanyayg 9y ago
This is something I've entered my email into after at least a year or so. Great presentation and design and I'm sure it's good content too -- I'll get to know over the coming week :)
tenaciousDaniel 9y ago
I really love this. Frustratingly few articles/posts/courses actually follow through on their promise to make difficult material intuitive. I'm only halfway through your Big-O post but it's already obvious that you've put a lot of care into really making it accessible. Well done!
- gameguy43 9y ago
  That is soooo great to hear because every time we "finish" writing a new piece we end up spending literal /months/ obsessively polishing it before taking it live. I always worry that we're just spinning our wheels. But it's great to hear that the extra effort is showing through :)
notjackson 9y ago
I really liked how you've added the option to select between many programming languages in the snippets! Did you write each of them yourself or is there a way to automate such simple code already?
- gameguy43 9y ago
  We have a team of like a dozen and a half contractors from around the world who do the translations. It was important to us to not just translate our Python into C++, but to have C++ that was actually good, C++-style C++. So we hired C++ experts to do all the C++ translations. And same for the other languages. Now, none of us are C++ experts. So how did we know if the contractors we hired were any good? That's a whoooole blog post for another time. In short: Noah (an engineer on the team) came up with this clever system where we hired a bunch of people to translate the same code sample (as a paid trial task), then we hired a bunch of people to rate those people's translations (again, as a paid trial task). Then we hired the translator who had the best ratings, and we also hired the /rater/ who was most /thorough/--they do code reviews of the translator's code.
  - foota 9y ago
    Curious, how did you measure thorough-ness?
    - gameguy43 9y ago
      Definitely the least rigorous part of the process :) Some combination of: - Did they catch stuff that the other reviewers didn't catch? - Of the stuff they did catch, does it look to us like that's actually stuff that'll help make our code better, or is it just unhelpful pickiness?
  - faitswulff 9y ago
    Is this actually a blog post? I'd read it.
    - gameguy43 9y ago
      Not yet! Edit: but it'd make a good one, right?
      - faitswulff 9y ago
        Absolutely!
xenihn 9y ago
Happy customer since 2015. Any plans to add Go or Rust translations?
- gameguy43 9y ago
  No specific plans yet. But notes like this are how we decide which languages to add next! Curious: what language do you currently use on the site? And how painful is it for you to not have Go or Rust? (Also, you're talking about having the /content/ in those languages, right? Or supporting those languages in our code editor?)
  - xenihn 9y ago
    Yep, I'm talking about the content. I use Swift and Objective-C, but I've consulted InterviewCake content for every other language except PHP at some point. The sample data structures and question answers are nice code samples when I need a quick reminder for how to do basic things in languages that I don't use on a regular basis. Not having Go or Rust isn't a big deal, if I could choose one it'd be Go. I want to learn Go for myself, and asking for a friend for Rust. I also never use the editor on the site, I write/run the code on my machine. I never liked using the editor the few times I tried it. I see in another comment you made in this thread that a new one is coming soon, so I'm excited to try it. Any chance I could beta test? :)
    - gameguy43 9y ago
      Shoot me an email :)
vvanders 9y ago
Shoutout for including the bit about constants in O(n) notation, 99% of things I see cover it gloss over it. I've seen radix sort walk all over quicksort for common datasets many times. Knowing your dataset is at least as important as knowing the right algorithm.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

This is something I've entered my email into after at least a year or so. Great presentation and design and I'm sure it's good content too -- I'll get to know over the coming week :)

tenaciousDaniel 9y ago

I really love this. Frustratingly few articles/posts/courses actually follow through on their promise to make difficult material intuitive. I'm only halfway through your Big-O post but it's already obvious that you've put a lot of care into really making it accessible. Well done!

gameguy43 9y ago
That is soooo great to hear because every time we "finish" writing a new piece we end up spending literal /months/ obsessively polishing it before taking it live. I always worry that we're just spinning our wheels. But it's great to hear that the extra effort is showing through :)

notjackson 9y ago

I really liked how you've added the option to select between many programming languages in the snippets! Did you write each of them yourself or is there a way to automate such simple code already?

gameguy43 9y ago
We have a team of like a dozen and a half contractors from around the world who do the translations. It was important to us to not just translate our Python into C++, but to have C++ that was actually good, C++-style C++. So we hired C++ experts to do all the C++ translations. And same for the other languages. Now, none of us are C++ experts. So how did we know if the contractors we hired were any good? That's a whoooole blog post for another time. In short: Noah (an engineer on the team) came up with this clever system where we hired a bunch of people to translate the same code sample (as a paid trial task), then we hired a bunch of people to rate those people's translations (again, as a paid trial task). Then we hired the translator who had the best ratings, and we also hired the /rater/ who was most /thorough/--they do code reviews of the translator's code.
- foota 9y ago
  Curious, how did you measure thorough-ness?
  - gameguy43 9y ago
    Definitely the least rigorous part of the process :) Some combination of: - Did they catch stuff that the other reviewers didn't catch? - Of the stuff they did catch, does it look to us like that's actually stuff that'll help make our code better, or is it just unhelpful pickiness?
- faitswulff 9y ago
  Is this actually a blog post? I'd read it.
  - gameguy43 9y ago
    Not yet! Edit: but it'd make a good one, right?
    - faitswulff 9y ago
      Absolutely!

xenihn 9y ago

Happy customer since 2015. Any plans to add Go or Rust translations?

gameguy43 9y ago
No specific plans yet. But notes like this are how we decide which languages to add next! Curious: what language do you currently use on the site? And how painful is it for you to not have Go or Rust? (Also, you're talking about having the /content/ in those languages, right? Or supporting those languages in our code editor?)
- xenihn 9y ago
  Yep, I'm talking about the content. I use Swift and Objective-C, but I've consulted InterviewCake content for every other language except PHP at some point. The sample data structures and question answers are nice code samples when I need a quick reminder for how to do basic things in languages that I don't use on a regular basis. Not having Go or Rust isn't a big deal, if I could choose one it'd be Go. I want to learn Go for myself, and asking for a friend for Rust. I also never use the editor on the site, I write/run the code on my machine. I never liked using the editor the few times I tried it. I see in another comment you made in this thread that a new one is coming soon, so I'm excited to try it. Any chance I could beta test? :)
  - gameguy43 9y ago
    Shoot me an email :)

vvanders 9y ago

Shoutout for including the bit about constants in O(n) notation, 99% of things I see cover it gloss over it. I've seen radix sort walk all over quicksort for common datasets many times. Knowing your dataset is at least as important as knowing the right algorithm.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]