6 ms·

Show HN: I send out a weekly CS topic overview and code interview question

117 points by bcjordan 14y ago

zackzackzack 14y ago
The signup flow was really well done. A minor nitpick: put the social buttons at the bottom of the model after the (see sample -> signup -> congrats) process. I'm excited to get these emails!
bcjordan 14y ago
I'm also looking for guest posters with real interview questions from their company, or anyone who would like to guest post a CS topic overview. I can be reached at my username at gmail.
- krat0sprakhar 14y ago
  Thank you so much for doing this! Really excited to solve problems and improve my programming chops!
bcjordan 14y ago
If the site or signup form fail, I will also merge signups from this Google form: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dHhFNUVMSDduZW1nWXEtcm42ME1VYmc6MQ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dHhFNUV...
pendext 14y ago
I signed up after reading about this on Reddit. As someone who is looking for a first development job (graduating in May), this is a great resource.
Sean-Der 14y ago
This is an awesome idea bcjordan! I signed up, I am really excited to get the first email. If this stays CS only, and avoids the pitfalls of 'the industry' this might quickly become my favorite thing of the week :D Best of luck with it! Also, any plans to monetize it? What are your long terms with the project, hopefully it will be something to keep you interested for a long time.
nirvanatikku 14y ago
Clevverrr..! Having gone through this whole process recently, I can appreciate how this would have come in handy. FYI: I had used http://www.careercup.com/ http://www.careercup.com/ extensively.
- Jagat 14y ago
  Except for Gayle Laakman's extensive marketing and the heavy user base that followed, I don't see why careercup is popular in the first place. It is a terrible website with ads for her two books taking up half of the home page space. It would be great if someone could start a stackexchange site for discussing CS interview questions; I'm pretty sure the quality of questions and discussions would be better then.
  - nirvanatikku 14y ago
    um.. I think it's popular because it essentially is like a stackexchange for CS interview questions..... it has a ton of questions, some of which _actually_ popped up during interviews. As for the ads, I had no trouble ignoring them.
    - Jagat 14y ago
      "it essentially is like a stackexchange for CS interview questions" except for the bad website and tons of ads.
adolph 14y ago
Including the .vcf in the confirmation email is much smoother than those "add us to your contacts" messages. Very nice touch.
zallarak 14y ago
This is awesome! Thanks for putting it together.
pfraze 14y ago
Glad to find this -- not interviewing right now, but always keeping up on my skillset.
Permit 14y ago
I signed up and this seems pretty cool. FYI: "Mediocre programmer?" is too long for its container and defaults to "Mediocre programm...". I'm not sure if it's my screen or fonts or something, but I thought you might like to know.
jmcgough 14y ago
I like it! The "see a sample" modal looks really cluttered, though.
mrbgty 14y ago
Is that leaf icon on the sign up button some sort of standard icon now for sign ups? I'm not sure I understand it.
- bcjordan 14y ago
  I thought it looked pretty.
piqufoh 14y ago
Sounds great! Some thoughts: Your email field doesn't support tags http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Address_tags http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Address_tags and When entering an address with tags it fails with no error.
- bcjordan 14y ago
  Oi! Seems email '+' characters were being decoded into ' ' along the way. Patched, and I'm searching for records of those addresses to send invites. Thanks for reporting!
ktran 14y ago
Ahh, after I signed up for PyCoder (curtailed Python newsletter every Friday), I thought of doing something similar but tailoring to college students. You beat me to it! Awesome project bcjordan :)
Zaheer 14y ago
I created something similar a few months ago to send out a interview question every other day. The time constraints of maintaining it got to me though (I'm a university student myself) and I recently stopped sending out question of the day. I have plans to revive it later but for right now its in 'hiatus' mode so to speak. Check it out at: www.InterTechTion.com
ppierald 14y ago
No Terms of Service or Privacy Policy. I can imagine having a list of email addresses with people interested in getting coding interviews could be interesting to the right people with enough money.
- farmdawgnation 14y ago
  There being a TOS or Privacy Policy doesn't actually mean a company won't sell your emails. It just means they're going to say they're not going to sell your emails. Harsh, but true.
B-Con 14y ago
The confirmation e-mail doesn't have any link back to the website. Hopefully your weekly messages do, it's where most of us will look for a link if we want to share it with others.
josh_blum 14y ago
seems like a very cool idea! i'm exciting to use it and see where it goes. You do have some bugs to work out though, the UI isn't very consistent throughout the site and somehow I got redirected to here: http://interviewpractice.herokuapp.com/ http://interviewpractice.herokuapp.com/ and now can't see anything. I also had trouble the signup process and had to reset my password to join.
barrkel 14y ago
You know something that's easy to unsubscribe from? RSS.
brainstew 14y ago
Is the closed area already working? I tried resetting my password and logging in, and got "Invalid email or password."..
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
robomartin 14y ago
I hate code-writing puzzles during interviews. I don't use them at all. Why? Precisely because of methods such as this one where someone might memorize or learn a bunch of patterns to common puzzles going around. They come in and ace the interview test. Does it really tell you anything about the person other than they can train themselves like an intelligent monkey to produce the correct output given an input? My preference, by far, is to spend time discussing ideas and approaches to solving problems. I don't want to see code. I want to see into his/her brain. How do you think? How do you slice and dice a problem to try to get to core? How good are you at intuitively choosing a good data representation? Do you bring-up alternative approaches to optimize for size vs. raw speed or other parameters? What questions do you ask? Anyhow, whether the person can actually write two lines of code or not can be ascertained by looking at prior work (if available). The most interesting aspects of a programmer --the real reasons you might not want to let him(her) get away-- have nothing whatsoever to do with how quickly they can write a bunch of loops or if they have memorized five sorting algorithms. Nah, the real value is in how they think. That's what you want to hire them for. EDIT: Some of the best, most creative and versatile programmers I have known could not write code without a set of reference books next to them. Why? Because they don't have encyclopedic knowledge of the various languages they might use. They'd excel at dissecting data to reveal structure and representation and then choosing a good approach to solve the problem but more often than not had to have a library of various CS and language books around them to support their work. My point is that these people would have failed interview puzzles yet they contributed to and sometimes single-handedly drove projects that generated millions of dollars for the companies that employed them.
- JoshTriplett 14y ago
  > Some of the best, most creative and versatile programmers I have known could not write code without a set of reference books next to them. Why? Because they don't have encyclopedic knowledge of the various languages they might use You don't have to know everything about a language to solve problems in that language; if you need a set of reference books next to you for the languages you use every day, you don't know those languages very well. And a good interviewer will help you with discussion, if you have a reasonable approach to the problem: "I think there's a function to do foo, but I'd have to check the documentation to find the details." "It's called foomod.foo_doer; it takes a baz and a bar." "Ah, thanks. scribble scribble". (Or, alternatively, "I'm assuming a function foo_doer to do foo, which I think exists in the standard library, but if not I could write it easily enough.")
plaguuuuuu 14y ago
So.. you basically created a weekly blog consisting of interviewy programming puzzles and the only way I can read it is via email...
bevan 14y ago
Looking forward to this- the last couple similar services (periodical design/coding challenges) that I've signed up for fizzled out after 1-2 weeks. Hope this one sticks around!

117 points by bcjordan 14y ago

The signup flow was really well done. A minor nitpick: put the social buttons at the bottom of the model after the (see sample -> signup -> congrats) process. I'm excited to get these emails!

bcjordan 14y ago

I'm also looking for guest posters with real interview questions from their company, or anyone who would like to guest post a CS topic overview. I can be reached at my username at gmail.

krat0sprakhar 14y ago
Thank you so much for doing this! Really excited to solve problems and improve my programming chops!

bcjordan 14y ago

If the site or signup form fail, I will also merge signups from this Google form: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dHhFNUVMSDduZW1nWXEtcm42ME1VYmc6MQ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dHhFNUV...

pendext 14y ago

I signed up after reading about this on Reddit. As someone who is looking for a first development job (graduating in May), this is a great resource.

Sean-Der 14y ago

This is an awesome idea bcjordan! I signed up, I am really excited to get the first email. If this stays CS only, and avoids the pitfalls of 'the industry' this might quickly become my favorite thing of the week :D Best of luck with it! Also, any plans to monetize it? What are your long terms with the project, hopefully it will be something to keep you interested for a long time.

nirvanatikku 14y ago

Clevverrr..! Having gone through this whole process recently, I can appreciate how this would have come in handy. FYI: I had used http://www.careercup.com/ http://www.careercup.com/ extensively.

Jagat 14y ago
Except for Gayle Laakman's extensive marketing and the heavy user base that followed, I don't see why careercup is popular in the first place. It is a terrible website with ads for her two books taking up half of the home page space. It would be great if someone could start a stackexchange site for discussing CS interview questions; I'm pretty sure the quality of questions and discussions would be better then.
- nirvanatikku 14y ago
  um.. I think it's popular because it essentially is like a stackexchange for CS interview questions..... it has a ton of questions, some of which _actually_ popped up during interviews. As for the ads, I had no trouble ignoring them.
  - Jagat 14y ago
    "it essentially is like a stackexchange for CS interview questions" except for the bad website and tons of ads.

adolph 14y ago

Including the .vcf in the confirmation email is much smoother than those "add us to your contacts" messages. Very nice touch.

zallarak 14y ago

This is awesome! Thanks for putting it together.

pfraze 14y ago

Glad to find this -- not interviewing right now, but always keeping up on my skillset.

Permit 14y ago

I signed up and this seems pretty cool. FYI: "Mediocre programmer?" is too long for its container and defaults to "Mediocre programm...". I'm not sure if it's my screen or fonts or something, but I thought you might like to know.

jmcgough 14y ago

I like it! The "see a sample" modal looks really cluttered, though.

mrbgty 14y ago

Is that leaf icon on the sign up button some sort of standard icon now for sign ups? I'm not sure I understand it.

bcjordan 14y ago
I thought it looked pretty.

piqufoh 14y ago

Sounds great! Some thoughts: Your email field doesn't support tags http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Address_tags http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Address_tags and When entering an address with tags it fails with no error.

bcjordan 14y ago
Oi! Seems email '+' characters were being decoded into ' ' along the way. Patched, and I'm searching for records of those addresses to send invites. Thanks for reporting!

ktran 14y ago

Ahh, after I signed up for PyCoder (curtailed Python newsletter every Friday), I thought of doing something similar but tailoring to college students. You beat me to it! Awesome project bcjordan :)

Zaheer 14y ago

I created something similar a few months ago to send out a interview question every other day. The time constraints of maintaining it got to me though (I'm a university student myself) and I recently stopped sending out question of the day. I have plans to revive it later but for right now its in 'hiatus' mode so to speak. Check it out at: www.InterTechTion.com

ppierald 14y ago

No Terms of Service or Privacy Policy. I can imagine having a list of email addresses with people interested in getting coding interviews could be interesting to the right people with enough money.

farmdawgnation 14y ago
There being a TOS or Privacy Policy doesn't actually mean a company won't sell your emails. It just means they're going to say they're not going to sell your emails. Harsh, but true.

B-Con 14y ago

The confirmation e-mail doesn't have any link back to the website. Hopefully your weekly messages do, it's where most of us will look for a link if we want to share it with others.

josh_blum 14y ago

seems like a very cool idea! i'm exciting to use it and see where it goes. You do have some bugs to work out though, the UI isn't very consistent throughout the site and somehow I got redirected to here: http://interviewpractice.herokuapp.com/ http://interviewpractice.herokuapp.com/ and now can't see anything. I also had trouble the signup process and had to reset my password to join.

barrkel 14y ago

You know something that's easy to unsubscribe from? RSS.

brainstew 14y ago

Is the closed area already working? I tried resetting my password and logging in, and got "Invalid email or password."..

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

robomartin 14y ago

I hate code-writing puzzles during interviews. I don't use them at all. Why? Precisely because of methods such as this one where someone might memorize or learn a bunch of patterns to common puzzles going around. They come in and ace the interview test. Does it really tell you anything about the person other than they can train themselves like an intelligent monkey to produce the correct output given an input? My preference, by far, is to spend time discussing ideas and approaches to solving problems. I don't want to see code. I want to see into his/her brain. How do you think? How do you slice and dice a problem to try to get to core? How good are you at intuitively choosing a good data representation? Do you bring-up alternative approaches to optimize for size vs. raw speed or other parameters? What questions do you ask? Anyhow, whether the person can actually write two lines of code or not can be ascertained by looking at prior work (if available). The most interesting aspects of a programmer --the real reasons you might not want to let him(her) get away-- have nothing whatsoever to do with how quickly they can write a bunch of loops or if they have memorized five sorting algorithms. Nah, the real value is in how they think. That's what you want to hire them for. EDIT: Some of the best, most creative and versatile programmers I have known could not write code without a set of reference books next to them. Why? Because they don't have encyclopedic knowledge of the various languages they might use. They'd excel at dissecting data to reveal structure and representation and then choosing a good approach to solve the problem but more often than not had to have a library of various CS and language books around them to support their work. My point is that these people would have failed interview puzzles yet they contributed to and sometimes single-handedly drove projects that generated millions of dollars for the companies that employed them.

JoshTriplett 14y ago
> Some of the best, most creative and versatile programmers I have known could not write code without a set of reference books next to them. Why? Because they don't have encyclopedic knowledge of the various languages they might use You don't have to know everything about a language to solve problems in that language; if you need a set of reference books next to you for the languages you use every day, you don't know those languages very well. And a good interviewer will help you with discussion, if you have a reasonable approach to the problem: "I think there's a function to do foo, but I'd have to check the documentation to find the details." "It's called foomod.foo_doer; it takes a baz and a bar." "Ah, thanks. scribble scribble". (Or, alternatively, "I'm assuming a function foo_doer to do foo, which I think exists in the standard library, but if not I could write it easily enough.")

plaguuuuuu 14y ago

So.. you basically created a weekly blog consisting of interviewy programming puzzles and the only way I can read it is via email...

bevan 14y ago

Looking forward to this- the last couple similar services (periodical design/coding challenges) that I've signed up for fizzled out after 1-2 weeks. Hope this one sticks around!