smoovej

Questions for a Product Manager to ask an Engineer

Group Dynamics: Tell me about a group project you have worked on with many contrasting opinions involved.

• This is a softball, and a great opener.  Listen to how they talk about the group, the issues that arise, and how they assisted in the resolution.
• One of the greatest areas of deficiency in engineers candidates is their ability to manage group dynamics effectively. While in the perfect world we would all be building products happily and harmoniously, people are inherently flawed and there are typically personality conflicts, personal challenges, and all sorts of other "people" stuff involved with a successful launch.

Prioritization: Pick a simple mobile app (e.g. a music player) and pick 5 features you want to include (e.g. social sharing of the song they are listening to, a 5-star rating system). I then ask them to prioritize which gets built first and why.

smoovej

Originally published in June 2008

When hiring Ruby on Rails programmers, knowing the right questions to ask during an interview was a real challenge for me at first. In 30 minutes or less, it's difficult to get a solid read on a candidate's skill set without looking at code they've previously written. And in the corporate/enterprise world, I often don't have access to their previous work.

To ensure we hired competent ruby developers at my last job, I created a list of 15 ruby questions -- a ruby measuring stick if you will -- to select the cream of the crop that walked through our doors.

What to expect

Candidates will typically give you a range of responses based on their experience and personality. So it's up to you to decide the correctness of their answer.

smoovej

[16:03:31] ~/Sites/conspire-www (invitation_job_fix) $ heroku run console --app conspire
Running `console` attached to terminal... up, run.7025
DEPRECATION WARNING: You have Rails 2.3-style plugins in vendor/plugins! Support for these plugins will be removed in Rails 4.0. Move them out and bundle them in your Gemfile, or fold them in to your app as lib/myplugin/* and config/initializers/myplugin.rb. See the release notes for more on this: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/1/4/rails-3-2-0-rc2-has-been-released. (called from <top (required)> at /app/config/environment.rb:5)
DEPRECATION WARNING: You have Rails 2.3-style plugins in vendor/plugins! Support for these plugins will be removed in Rails 4.0. Move them out and bundle them in your Gemfile, or fold them in to your app as lib/myplugin/* and config/initializers/myplugin.rb. See the release notes for more on this: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/1/4/rails-3-2-0-rc2-has-been-released. (called from <top (required)> at /app/config/environment.rb:5)
** [Rave

smoovej

class Introductions < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    create_table :introductions do |t|

      t.references :account
      t.string :recipient_address
      t.string :recipient_name
      t.string :subject
      t.text :body
      t.string :message_id

smoovej

From: /Users/smoovej/Sites/conspire-www/app/models/graph_resource/person.rb @ line 30 GraphResource::Person.create_person:

    27:   def self.create_person( hash )
    28:
    29:     response = self.api_post( "", hash )
 => 30: binding.pry
    31:     if response.code == 201
    32:       return response.parsed_response
    33:     else
    34:       raise response.response

smoovej

// Does this belong in the resolvers Seq?
  // resolvers += Classpaths.typesafeResolver

  val conspireSettings = Project.defaultSettings ++ Seq(
    version := appVersion,
    scalaVersion := V.Scala,
    exportJars := true,
    parallelExecution in Test := false,
    resolvers ++= Seq(
      "Typesafe Releases" at "http://repo.typesafe.com/typesafe/releases",

smoovej

=Navigating=
    visit('/projects')
    visit(post_comments_path(post))

=Clicking links and buttons=
    click_link('id-of-link')
    click_link('Link Text')
    click_button('Save')
    click('Link Text') # Click either a link or a button
    click('Button Value')

smoovej

def show
  @article = Article.find(params[:id])
  respond_to do |format|
    format.html
    format.json { render json: @article.as_json(only: [:id, :name, :content], include: [:author, {comments: {only:[:id, :name, :content]}}]) }
  end
end

smoovej

How I setup my machine after a fresh install

Download and Install Applications

1. Install Dropbox
2. Install 1Password
3. Install Alfred
4. Install Skype
5. Install iTerm
6. Install Cloud App
7. Install BetterTouchTool

smoovej

city = 'Lima' if city == 'Lima, Cusco, Sacred Valley'
city = 'Yukon' if city == 'Yukon'
city = 'San Francisco' if city == 'Bay Area'
city = 'Geneva' if city == 'Geneva, Anthy'
city = 'Denver' if city == 'Denver/Boulder'
city = 'Los Gatos' if city == 'Castle Rock State Park'
city = 'Kars' if city == 'Kars, Ardahan, Artvin'
city = 'Alicante' if city == 'Bollua near Alicante'
city = 'Mount Rainier' if city == 'Mt. Rainier National Park'
city = 'Mount Shasta' if city == 'Mt. Shasta'