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queenlua asked: Sorry if I'm being dense/pendantic, but—what's the difference between asking "What version control system do you guys use?" and "Do you use git?" Since you claim asking the latter is superior...

It’s just a bit of my bias showing :-).

I think that “What version control system do you guys use?” is passive and perhaps too forgiving.

I enjoy using git, so it makes sense for me to ask about it directly. If the response is “No.”, or “What’s git?”, I know things are not headed in the right direction.

Questions for Interviewers

In the past, I haven’t done a good job of asking questions to interviewers. Even if I feel like I’ve done a stellar job on the technical parts of the interview, I often lock up and follow through with trite and shallow questions.

Here’s a list of questions that don’t accomplish a lot;

• So, what’s a normal day at X like?

  (Uh huh. Uh huh. Nice.)

• Which version control system do you guys use?

  (Oh, Y? Ok, I guess.)

• Hm, what are you working on?

  (Z? Huh. Sounds like you enjoy it.)

Interviewers gain little to no information about you when you ask questions like this. And you probably aren’t learning things that you haven’t already inferred.

Here’s a ready list of important questions you can ask in the future. These should let you know if you really want to work at X, and should let the interviewer know that you’ve thought things through.

• What will my first month at X look like?

• How does the culture at X help maintain a high-quality codebase?

• Does X believe in face-to-face meetings? How frequent are meetings?

• How do developers communicate most of the time? What’s the average latency between requests and responses?

• Do you use git?

• What was your impression of X after completing your first major project? What do you think of X now?

• What is working with HR like?

• Is working in the office fun?

• Are people in the office friends outside of work?

Don’t lock up, stay loose, and be confident :-).

When the designers of a bad language decide to add a poorly-understood, “powerful” new feature

this-plt-life:

When somebody says “it’s written in C, so it must be fast”

this-plt-life:

When everybody and their dog writes a poor OOP critique

this-plt-life:

When I see three layers of weird DSLs for configuring a single app

this-plt-life:

(Hello, Jetty.)

When I discover that my configuration file format is turning into one of those bad DSLs

this-plt-life:

When I finally grokked delimited continuations

this-plt-life:

A Monadic Framework)

Trash to some

My friend and I were discussing Galois fields in a restaurant near campus when a young woman walked in.

She cautiously made her way to a table not far away from ours and sat down, examining the food left behind by others.

Her face was affectless and grey. Her hair, dreaded and matted. Her clothes were all black: worn, but intact.

She was carrying a backpack.

We could sense that she did not want to feel our eyes on her clothes. She had done her best to keep them neat.

I looked up and studied my friend’s face, monitoring his eyes.

There was an almost imperceptible pause in our conversation.

Our faces betrayed no shock or surprise.

We stared directly at each other, each issuing an unspoken warning to keep speaking about Galois fields. To allow this woman to remain invisible. To preserve her dignity.

She started hungrily at the food left behind on the table.

Then, quietly, she left.