johnbocook

A lot of these are outright stolen from Edward O'Campo-Gooding's list of questions. I really like his list.

I'm having some trouble paring this down to a manageable list of questions -- I realistically want to know all of these things before starting to work at a company, but it's a lot to ask all at once. My current game plan is to pick 6 before an interview and ask those.

I'd love comments and suggestions about any of these.

I've found questions like "do you have smart people? Can I learn a lot at your company?" to be basically totally useless -- everybody will say "yeah, definitely!" and it's hard to learn anything from them. So I'm trying to make all of these questions pretty concrete -- if a team doesn't have an issue tracker, they don't have an issue tracker.

I'm also mostly not asking about principles, but the way things are -- not "do you think code review is important?", but "Does all code get reviewed?".

johnbocook

#System Design Cheatsheet

Picking the right architecture = Picking the right battles + Managing trade-offs

##Basic Steps

1. Clarify and agree on the scope of the system

• User cases (description of sequences of events that, taken together, lead to a system doing something useful)
  • Who is going to use it?
  • How are they going to use it?

johnbocook

When dealing with arrays in PHP, checking for an index like if ($a['foo']) throws a PHP warning.

There are two ways to avoid these warnings: one is using isset(), which checks the existance of an array index. The second one is empty(), which not only checks for the existence of the array index, but also that the value that contains is not empty (not NULL, 0, '' or FALSE).

Here are some console examples:

juampy@juampybox $ php -a
php > $a = array('foo' => 'asdfasd');
php > 

johnbocook

<?php
function add_embed_tweet_meta_box() {
    add_meta_box(
        'paulund_embed_tweet_meta_box', // $id
        'Post Embed Tweets Meta Box', // $title
        'show_embed_tweet_meta_box', // $callback
        'post', // $page
        'normal', // $context
        'high'); // $priority
}