Coding during an interview is completely fine for a senior engineer. I want to be able to understand how a candidate is able to solve problems. I agree that throwing them into a viper pit when they show up isn’t ideal, and certainly what it can feel like. But coding interviews are great when it’s not about fussing over which libraries or random trivia they know. Interviewers have to create a good environment and strategy to test for the signals they’re looking for (without overfitting).
I’ve had plenty of interviews where they are just testing me on random framework trivia. And it’s just like…yeah, what happens when we stop using that framework? People don’t think beyond that at all. Funny enough, when I ended up taking those jobs, it turns out the culture is toxic and full of insecure people who are aggressive so they don’t get found out to have imperfect engineering knowledge.
And in startups it’s especially important to have a strategy because you’ll often see the interviewers (who would be the candidate’s peer) come up with insane problems that are simply a way to scare away competition and aren’t even trying to perceive if the person is reasoning well. I haven’t seen this lead to positive outcomes. – And of course suddenly all the companies are throwing their hands up wondering where the talent is…
Does anyone actually enjoy coding interviews? I’ve only been on the
receiving end. Between anxiety and social phobia and feeling threatened
by strangers, I’m in fight-or-flight mode, with the rational part
of my brain shutting down.
What’s funny is that I can do public speaking quite effectively, because
I can prepare for it. In other words, switch on the autopilot
and let my programming take over (no pun intended).
Yes! But, I am a white male with a lot of experience, so I am not worried about a lack of opportunity if I screw up.
For me, the only prep I do for interviews is to read one or two good articles to get my mind in tech land, and go in cold, otherwise. I draw upon my experiences to recognize problems and have an honest conversation, share my thoughts, keep an open dialogue, ask questions, etc.
I enjoy the random set of challenges being thrown at me. I have been passed on at some FAANG companies, but I have had a very successful and fulfilling career working with amazing people, on impactful products, so… for me this strategy has worked out very well! And, I’ve never come out of an interview without learning something new.
I like to interview semi-regularly – at least once every 1.5 years. I enjoy doing this for several reasons:
It’s a low-risk way for me to see what companies in my area really want to hire for. Lots of places in my area want .NET experience, so when I wanted to play around with a ML-esque language I picked F# so I can kill two birds with one stone.
It’s a great way to build my network. I live in an area with perhaps a few dozen major tech companies, and by interviewing around I’ve met a lot of the hiring managers. I know who I’d like to work for and who to avoid. And I’ve received a few direct references this way as well.
I’ve made the mistake before of waiting too long at a job that is starting to go bad. Interviewing often is a good motivator for me to leave.
The fastest way to beat impostor syndrome and to worry about interviewing is to get a job offer ;)
But when I treat interviews like this, there’s zero stress for me: my interviews are just like yours, a nice conversation, open dialogue about problems I’ve solved and problems the business faces, and generally easy and comfortable.
E: Because apg pointed it out, and I think it matters: I definitely have the same privilege he does, which changes my perspective, and when I’m on the other side of the table and evaluating candidates I consistently try to make that count less. One tip I got: I often get to review resumes to decide who to ask for a phone screen, and I’ve asked the internal recruiters I work with to send me resumes with no identifying information. I don’t know how it changes my recommendations, but it’s one more avenue that keeps any implicit bias from slipping in, so I suspect it’s worthwhile.
I don’t do biographical interviews anymore, and so I don’t even look at the person’s resume at all, until after I’ve submitted my evaluation. The interview feedback my company uses is based on our principles and each interview attempts to evaluate the candidate against a set of them. I’ve not been here long enough to have strong opinions on it yet. So far, I’ve enjoyed the attempts the framework makes to be unbiased, and feel that decisions have been fairly obvious as a result.
The interview I’ve been doing is a systems design thing, so technical, but not coding.
I’ve been trying to steer the ship away from the “resume -> phone screen -> broader phone screen -> in person” pipeline for a while, but it is fairly ingrained.
The interview feedback my company uses is based on our principles and each interview attempts to evaluate the candidate against a set of them
Could you share some examples on this? I suspect I’m about to be on another round of interviews and am curious how this works.
Principles – each of the interviews has a set of these that can be evaluated. Sometimes the interviews overlap in these principles, which is fine. The interview feedback I fill out has specific questions related to the interview, with a big focus on the principles.
I’m not convinced that being a white male helps, though that may depend where you are. At my place of work they have quotas with the effect that women get places more easily.
I enjoy coding interviews to a large extent but it is always a major relief when they’re over. And I’m never fully relaxed in any kind of interview. I do very extensive preparation. My mind tends to go blank when asked for examples from my past experience. And, I’m probably not very good at interviews because in 25 years I’ve only ever landed one job offer after an interview. That’s included two rejections from FAANG companies. So by my example, being a white male with lots of experience is not enough on its own. Only time I’ve changed jobs it was to a competitor where they already new me well from working with me for the same client - and that didn’t last long because my original company bought them.
I’m not convinced that being a white male helps, though that may depend where you are. At my place of work they have quotas with the effect that women get places more easily.
Hmm. This reads to me as if you don’t believe that white male privilege exists, and instead of responding with ways in which I’ve benefited over the years, I’ll ask you to see if any of these 160 things happen to apply to your situation, especially the work place section? I get that the name of this website may sound pretty scary, but I hope you can look past any potential bias there and give it a fair read.
Fun story from my past: I once worked for a company that announced a new diversity and inclusion “council” which was literally comprised of 3-4 Director level folks, 2-3 senior managers, all of which were white and male. I wish I could say that I had trust in this initiative, but needles to say that it was adjusted after some of us raised very publicly that this seemed like a questionable choice.
Try not to worry about whether or not the deck is stacked against you (some folks will insist it is, many will insist it isn’t, some will try to gaslight you about your own experiences either way); there are probably easier wins (resume polishing, practice being interviewed and general social anxiety defusing tricks, better negotiation techniques, and so forth) than worrying about things you can’t control. Good luck to you!
It’s natural that loss of privilege can feel like oppression. I try to take comfort from knowing that many other peoples’ real oppression is really being diminished.
I really enjoy coding interviews. I like high pressure/challenging scenarios, it’s a situation where preparedness pays off and I am a very social person. It’s also a great opportunity to learn more about how other people do their business, and how they interview people. Getting interviewed makes me a better interviewer.
Yes. I love coding interviews. This is an employee market, if I fail, l’ll interview somewhere else. Companies should be more worried about their false negative rate and the time they waste interviewing people, but they don’t… Their loss. To make a moneyball analogy: there are a lot of undervalued players on the market.
I’ve been on both sides. And I considerably prefer the interviewee side, I rarely learned something or been challenged/amazed on the interviewer side.
Yes, I do. Rather, I like the effect they have on job hunting as a whole. I don’t think it’s ever been easier to increase your income than before since you can prove your skills in a few hours. Solve some problems, get a bump in comp or move over to another company with a different wlb. The true interview is the first 3 months working with people, not the first few hours spent locked in a single room with them.
There are people who enjoy, but this question may apply to any kind of interview. Most people don’t enjoy at all any type of interview. It does not matter if you are a software developer, a pilot or a teacher, it is not a situation we are used to be and when we are not able to show our best, we feel sad.
On the other hand, I see a lot of complaints on the coding interview with regards to white board interview and questions. What I see on those complaints is that people actually do not propose a real solution to it, just pure complaints.
I made more than 130+ interviews during the last 3 years as an interviewer. During my interviews I never focus on the code the person writes, but if I can work with the person. I look for values such as: the person makes questions, can we communicate properly, can we have work together on a programming challenge. What I find wrong is to ask something very specific like RBT and expect to implement and remember it: this is super specific and does not tell you if you will succeed in the position.
For me interviewing its more about does this person match the team and knows how to work in team/pair.
On the doing end, I basically have always said no to homework interviews (they’re usually open-ended but just really boring and seem time consuming). An exception has been one place that had interesting questions (sort of “Advent of Code”-style stuff, where it’s not algorithmic prowess, more just a bit of elbow grease and a fun result). For face-to-face stuff, it’s been usually pretty awful. The worst was doing a really simple algorithm problem on a board, and then having the interviewer try to press me on index math (my original solution involved some zipping and stuff and the guy was like “let’s stick to C-ish semantics”). Very frustrating stuff. I also messed up a “string reversal” exercise through my own fault (it was easy in theory!) I feel like it’s a good test of “can you solve advent of code stuff fast”.
On the giving end, we have a vertical slice of a django application that we use for “full-stack”/backend roles. I think it’s been very effective. People pass with flying colors or fail entirely (we really try to make people pass because of all the stress etc involved, and try to reassure people that we are really not trying to ding anyone). And we try to have a lot of varied angles, so people can show off what they know. Again, we are trying to make people pass. Seeing people succeed is extremely gratifying and I’ve learned some stuff from watching people do it.
We aren’t doing fancy algo stuff so we don’t talk about fancy algo stuff (unless candidate brings it up and it’s a fun conversation). We are a CRUD-y webapp with a bunch of legacy code, so we test CRUD-y webapp skills on an unknown codebase.
You calculated correctly, but the answer to “how big the error would be” is it depends :). There are two ways to look at the error of a measurement or a computation. The first one is the one you tried above – the absolute magnitude – which tells you half the picture.
The other half is the relative error. The difference between 3 and 3.141592 is 0.141592 or about 4.5%. A 4.5% error is good enough for some things (e.g. weighing scales at the farmers market) and really bad for some other things (e.g. high-precision scales for the chemical industry).
Both of these tell you useful things – you generally want to keep both in mind when making any kind of assessment.
(Edit: oh yeah, one other interesting thing. Relative error is adimensional, it’s just a percentage. Absolute error has whatever unit you’re measuring, and sometimes that tells you a bit about how big an error is in physical terms. In your case, if we’re talking, say, 3 539 816 339 molecules of water, that’s a tiny fraction of a water drop. If we’re talking 3 539 816 339 grains of rice, that’s about 410,000 cups of rice which is, like, a lot of rice).
Ah! That’s good to know thanks :) So generally I would want to additionally examine the relative error and see how it relates to the absolute magnitude between two values.
My last two clients write their backend services with swift and it’s going well for them. Those services are running on linux.
I honestly don’t see much usage of swift outside of the apple ecosystem. I should add that my client’s business is an iOS app.
I’m using an OLKB. I love it more than anything. It took a second to adjust, but less time than I had thought. It has ruined all other keyboards for me, and now as the days go by I’m convinced there needs to be laptop with an ortholinear keyboard built in. OR I need to somehow change my laptop to be some combination of portable computer, keyboard, mouse, and portable screen
I bought a HHKB last year, and it’s been ok. A lot of people seem to over-hype it, and it might be a bit too expensive. There is a difference though, even if you only conciously realize it when using a cheaper keyboard. The default layout (control, backspace, tilde) is also something I miss on other keyboards…
There is something about ergonomic keyboards that I find “visually” unappealing. I can’t put my finger on it, it might be that they seem to use more space, or that the concept of a split keyboard is just foreign to me.
A controller with firmware customizability made a big difference in my usage. The domes make it slightly more tactile but the difference isn’t that noticeable IMO.
That’s my general thoughts as well. It’s way too expensive for what it is… But if you have one and you use the command line a lot, it is really quite ergonomic for the situation.
I have this as well and I am quite disappointed… the keys get stuck every couple days and forces me to restart (I’ve cleaned it a number of times). Rather disruptive…
Yeah, it would be really nice to be able to fit an ortho keyboard + trackpoint into a laptop. Maybe there’s even enough space that you could have the keyboard slightly movable.
If specifications are open and there’s no restriction (e.g. patent licensing) so that everybody can freely design, make and sell specification-compliant modules (including the container/shell itself), welcome.
Otherwise, good riddance.
I am not optimistic, as I couldn’t easily find the information on licensing in the website.
The ars writeup of this makes promising sounds like
The company also pledges to open up its hardware ecosystem to third parties, which will be able to design, build, and sell compatible modules via a Framework Marketplace.
But as you point out, there’s no information on licensing, etc. in that handwaving. I’m optimistic that it’s at least on their radar as something they think is good for them. That said, I’ll be waiting to see what evolves once things are shipping before I get excited.
I do hope a system with field repairability by its owner becomes available. Because the ones I liked (Thinkpads) are going away from that lately.
We’ll be publishing specifications and reference designs for the Expansion Card system under open licenses, and releasing documentation around the internal interfaces. Our focus is on building a hardware ecosystem around the Framework Laptop.
I’m pretty optimistic about this. It sounds like they paid enough attention to everything that techies were talking about. I think they’ll come up with reasonable licensing as well… at least in the beginning. I don’t think they’ll do a worse job than Apple regarding hardware lockdown.
The real problem is that a handful of big players heaped complexity atop
complexity, creating a morass of web “standards”, many of which are user-hostile to begin with. This led to the situation
where it is nigh impossible for anyone but big players to create and maintain
a usable browser. So here we are, with the chickens coming home to roost.
Full disclosure: I’ve been involved with an alternative browser effort for
many years; edbrowse.
I kind of want to start my own browser project. I was thinking it could be useful to work on one part of the browser engine. that way there could be multiple projects and others would find it easier to start their own browser. Though I need to research what’s out there.
Here’s our documentation on how to contribute to Gecko and Firefox. We regularly create good first bugs to help newcomers get to know our processes & practices. Contributing to Firefox can be done in HTML, JavaScript, CSS, C++, Rust and even Kotlin.
We also have a chat room on Matrix for new contributors, #introduction:mozilla.org
If you’re interested in writing your a mobile browser from scratch, our Android team has created a set of components to build your own browser, so you can pick and mix. I think it could be a great start, but obviously mobile-only.
In my experience Mozilla isn’t great at reacting to outside contributions. For example, I opened a PR half a year ago in the eslint-plugin-no-unsanitized repository and while you initially reviewed it very fast (thanks for that!) by describing what needed to be changed, there hasn’t been any activity on that PR since I applied the changes you recommended.
This hasn’t been the only encounter where this happened. Sometimes I open bugs on BMO with a patch to fix it and the patch only gets reviewed multiple months later, if it doesn’t get ignored entirely. I understand that you’re all very busy and managing outside contributions is hard (that’s why Google doesn’t want them!) but I wish Mozilla would improve on this front.
Ironically, my best experience with contributing to a Mozilla project has been submitting a patch to Thunderbird, which isn’t strictly a Mozilla project anymore :).
I can’t even think of a contribution where I would be reasonably sure that it would be accepted.
I think Mozilla has made it clear time and time again that people technically proficient – enough to have an opinion differing from Mozilla’s – are outside the browser target user group, and therefore their opinion is irrelevant.
To be honest, the best way to get things in Firefox is probably to get it into Chrome and then hope that Firefox copies it after a while.
I am looking forward to its use with the //go:embed directive for embedding static files in the compiled binary.
While the third-party solutions work well (e.g. go-bindata), I usually only need 1 or two files embedded, so having that supported out of the box is a welcome addition, especially when I can combine it with the io.FS interfaces so the files don’t need writing to disk for occasional operations which only know how to read from real disks.
“…encourage co-operation across borders”
well said! I actually never considered geopolitical impact with processors. could you point me towards some reading, or share insight?
(Am drummer) A total latency, i.e. of the whole chain, of 3-10 ms is okay. 3-10 ms for a single MIDI message is 3-10 times more than one would expect :-). Also, jitter matters enormously. A constant latency of 20 ms is annoying, but you can sort of live with it if you really try. Constantly jittering between 5 and 20 ms, on the other hand, feels like you’ve had one too many drinks.
Two months later, RISC-V, TOML, Gemini and Godot has good traction and Zig is still very promising (and under development - not Rust-levels of safety yet).
MIDI over Bluetooth, on the other hand, has delay and setup issues. I’ve tried it and I have lost faith in it.
Three months later, there are some MIDI over Bluetooth hardware solutions that claim to be able to send signals with a 3ms delay. I tried the CME WIDI device. So far, it has been a complete hassle to set up on my Android phone, but the delay is very low. It also feels fine to play with a MIDI controller connected to a Linux machine, where Jack then redirects the MIDI signal via Bluetooth to the WIDI device.
Struggling like crazy to make my new Pinebook Pro into a usable environment.
I am so incredibly on board with the idea of inexpensive portable hardware as a force multiplier for people who don’t enjoy the privileges I do, but wow it has been an incredibly bumpy ride.
Today, after the latest incident of sleep not working and draining the battery because I forgot and just closed the lid before going to bed, I’m getting a red LED on power on. The forum says I should try booting with the battery disconnected, but honestly I’ve been a bit too intimidated to try disassembling the thing because I’ve seen about a dozen Youtube videos of people lacerating themselves trying to do the same, and I’m partially blind..
I had hoped to be able to contribute to the software ecosystem around this thing and maybe help some people, but I’m beginning to think that despite having at least fair to middlin’ tech chops, this may be over my head.
Nice! Have you managed to get yours to sleep without draining your battery?
I’m actually really enjoying it in just about every other way. Battery life is amazing. Keyboard and display are surprisingly good, and porting apps to AARCH64 is fun :)
Cool! I have one sitting in my office. I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet. But once I’m done moving this weekend, and my client work has wrapped up for the month, I’m going to see about getting it into a usable place. Though I have a thinkpad that is further along.
I’m interested in ARM and cheap hardware that can do a lot. How we do make computers that work well in constrained environments? Hope you write something up :)
I’ll simply say that I’ve found both the forums and the Discord/matrix chat community utterly invaluable in my journey.
Tonight’s minor adventure was figuring out how I wanted to back up my work to my NAS, and I eventually came around to a temporary NFS mount and rsync to copy over the changed files.
One thing to note: My biggest ongoing struggle thus far has been trying to get anything like sleep to work.
By default, currently, under the stock Manjaro 20.08 shipped with the Pinebook Pro, if you close the lid and walk away for the evening your battery will be dead by morning.
Apparently this is due to bugs in the Trusted Firmware software the system uses, and apparently it’s subtle and painful to fix, because I’m getting conflicting reports on whether the folks who hold the context are just burned out and have temporarily run away or maybe that it’s being worked on.
It’s an open source experiment so ultimately it’s not like I’m blaming Pine64 for this, but it certainly puts a dent in the laptop’s usability as a portable work device. For now, with pandemic isolation in force, I just leave it plugged in and powered up at night and that’s getting the job done :)
I think having vendors provide and support their closed source products on Linux represents a major step forward for the platform.
I am super pleased that a fully open alternative in this space exists, but I use and love 1Password and am chuffed to hear about this, because right now I have to use sub optimal browser extensions or WINE hacks to approximate this.
Yes! I agree wholeheartedly. It’s a very good sign for the Linux desktop platform as a whole that companies are willing to write and support closed-source desktop applications. Unlike Windows or macOS, Linux desktop machines are much more diverse and backwards compatibility is much less guaranteed. It’s also worth mentioning that distributions and communities usually step up to support particularly important pieces of proprietary software (think Steam) on unsupported distributions and configurations.
Since 1Password is commercial software, making it available has to make financial sense. While they might be supporting Linux primarily as a marketing ploy to technical people instead of as a result of the number of Linux users, I think it’s more likely that they’re doing this because enough existing users would install it on Linux machines if given the option. That means that there has to be some significant overlap between 1Password users and Linux users.
Yup that’s absolutely true. They get the question often enough that there is (or was) a blurb in their support thing about using WINE as a hack-around, or at least their was before they came out with 1PasswordX for Chrome/Firefox.
1PasswordX is an OK solution, but I really REALLY missed the native app as I use it for things like secure note storage and credit card autofill as well.
Probably nothing, but that’s not the point. The point is that there are a decidedly non zero number of users who are already bought in to the 1Password ecosystem for any number of reasons, and providing first class support for them on Linux feels like a super clear cut win to me.
Two thing I like in 1Password compared to BitWarden are 1) the secret key which is totally random, used to encrypt/decrypt the database entries and only stored locally and 2) TouchID and FaceID support on macOS and iOS.
(Disclaimer: I switched from 1Password to BitWarden about 15 months ago, mostly because it had become clear that there was no way to stay up to date with current 1P features without also having Agile host my password store. I didn’t mind paying them, but I’d like to bring my own sync, please! It was also getting trickier to keep running 1Password under WINE, and most of my daily stuff had moved to a Linux desktop. So my basis for comparison might be out of date.)
BitWarden’s iOS Touch ID and Face ID support has gotten quite good lately. They also integrate with iOS password management much better than they used to. I have never tried touch ID on a mac so I don’t know if it works with that.
The things I still miss from 1Password are:
Much better password capture in the browser
Ability to sign into the background daemon once and have multiple applications (browsers, desktop clients) access it
Better integration with system locking
Richer password generation settings
The things I prefer about BitWarden are:
All source code is available
Easily self-hostable, either using their resource-intensive official package or the community supplied bitwarden_rs
Good command line client. (I think 1Password has one now… when I switched, their command line client was new and required you to host your database on Agile’s service, which was a deal breaker for me.)
The hard tie-in to the service component is really what stops me. I wish Agile would copy BitWarden in that regard and let people self-host but pay them the fee. I cheerfully do that because I want to support them, I just don’t want them to have my passwords.
It is only me, or were they trying too hard to imitate Steve Jobs when he introduced the PowerPC->Intel switch, like when the “confessed” to have been using the new architecture “before”, even though that looses all meaning in a recorded environment?
This is intentional. They named things as successors of previous iterations of the same technologies – universal 2 and rosetta 2 – while making a reveal presentation that feels just like the same as the Intel reveal in the past. This is an emotional trick to show old-time Apple users that just like that previous transition, this new one will be successful and OK.
These are what I wanted to see, and I’d have been tempted to hide/flag if the content given had lacked any links to further technical detail.
But since that wasn’t the case, I think there’s value in highlighting the Kickstarter so people can support the project if they’re interested?
I’m often tempted to write comments like this on “does x belong here?” threads then abandon them to avoid spamming up the discussion further. So, an actual suggestion:
Perhaps in cases like this where there’s a good reason to link to the PR material, we could encourage people to also add a comment or blurb calling out any relevant links or technical information?
Agreed! I think this is squarely on-topic. It’s an interesting product that inspired me to read about https://pwnagotchi.ai/ and other associated devices. I learned a lot from reading the reading this page and searching the web for the topics mentioned. The USB stack fuzzing idea is interesting. I think I might try exactly that on a piece of embedded equipment I have lying around.
Probably a real swine to write drivers for, but as usual, ti supplies a bunch of libraries you could use.
Moore’s Law has ceased to be “Doubling of CPU speed every 18 months”. Actually, it never was.
Actually as stated by Moore, it was “Doubling the number of transistors every 12”. That has reach the peak of how much plain CPU speed that can be delivered.
What is still happening, is more and more powerful and weirder and more exotic chips like this.
Can you explain what makes this a weird, exotic, impressive beast? Almost all of my deep knowledge relates to server hardware, I haven’t worked with microcontroller-scale things for about a decade.
Read the data sheet I linked to for the full details, but basically…
It’s a radio receiver transmitter (transceiver) that frequency hops over 300-348 MHz, 387-464 MHz and 779-928 MHz bands and converts from an RF baseband signal to a stream of samples (i/q’s) and then encode/decode data from that via a bunch of different modem algorithms, plus a bunch of nifty stuff require to make it practical (sync detect, address and crc check, …) in a tiny (2.4mmx2.4mm) package.
In The Bad Old Days that used to require a lot of fancy rf circuitry, maybe an fpga, certainly a dsp, and a hell of a lot of very fancy maths and very smart code.
Ahh interesting. Yes, this is why I needed an explanation because I don’t do this stuff for a living. But certainly want to learn more. I can’t do much with a data sheet just yet
I’m on the software side of the picture so there is always more for me to learn on the RF/hardware side, but I at least know where the various tasks are done on the device I work on.
There are a lot of these super smart super tiny chips coming on the market… the down side smart equals complex to drive, and chip tends to mean you get what you get, if the chip doesn’t do what you want…. get another chip (means PCB redesign) and have a massive task of rewriting your drivers.
If you ever pull the bluetooth standard and print it out, (you will need to buy a new bookcase), you get an idea of the scale of “tiny,cheap,super smart aka insanely complex” I’m talking about.
That said, a lot of things that were very expensive, are becoming available at commodity prices. In some ways dumber, someways less customised, but with 90% of what you want.
i guess if it is paired with another ti µc it should be quite easy. i have still an ez430 chronos lying around, which wasn’t too hard to write code for, given the examples etc.
It’s just a joke about “x on lobste.rs should only ever be y” purity posts. You know what they say about death, taxes, and arguments about what lobsters “is”…
2D C99 Game Engine. I had been committing every day for several months and then had to take a break or burnout. Spinning things up again feels difficult, so I’m going to plan some smaller stuff out, and then hopefully finish a plugin system.
that’s exciting. a simple game engine is on my short list of projects to step up my C skills. What would you say is a good first milestone for making one?
Oh duh. Yeah that’s a good point. Don’t worry so much about every single detail. Get something on the screen. How do I move it? Remove it? Add more of it? etc… Thanks!
Coding during an interview is completely fine for a senior engineer. I want to be able to understand how a candidate is able to solve problems. I agree that throwing them into a viper pit when they show up isn’t ideal, and certainly what it can feel like. But coding interviews are great when it’s not about fussing over which libraries or random trivia they know. Interviewers have to create a good environment and strategy to test for the signals they’re looking for (without overfitting).
I’ve had plenty of interviews where they are just testing me on random framework trivia. And it’s just like…yeah, what happens when we stop using that framework? People don’t think beyond that at all. Funny enough, when I ended up taking those jobs, it turns out the culture is toxic and full of insecure people who are aggressive so they don’t get found out to have imperfect engineering knowledge.
And in startups it’s especially important to have a strategy because you’ll often see the interviewers (who would be the candidate’s peer) come up with insane problems that are simply a way to scare away competition and aren’t even trying to perceive if the person is reasoning well. I haven’t seen this lead to positive outcomes. – And of course suddenly all the companies are throwing their hands up wondering where the talent is…
Does anyone actually enjoy coding interviews? I’ve only been on the receiving end. Between anxiety and social phobia and feeling threatened by strangers, I’m in fight-or-flight mode, with the rational part of my brain shutting down. What’s funny is that I can do public speaking quite effectively, because I can prepare for it. In other words, switch on the autopilot and let my programming take over (no pun intended).
Yes! But, I am a white male with a lot of experience, so I am not worried about a lack of opportunity if I screw up.
For me, the only prep I do for interviews is to read one or two good articles to get my mind in tech land, and go in cold, otherwise. I draw upon my experiences to recognize problems and have an honest conversation, share my thoughts, keep an open dialogue, ask questions, etc.
I enjoy the random set of challenges being thrown at me. I have been passed on at some FAANG companies, but I have had a very successful and fulfilling career working with amazing people, on impactful products, so… for me this strategy has worked out very well! And, I’ve never come out of an interview without learning something new.
I like to interview semi-regularly – at least once every 1.5 years. I enjoy doing this for several reasons:
But when I treat interviews like this, there’s zero stress for me: my interviews are just like yours, a nice conversation, open dialogue about problems I’ve solved and problems the business faces, and generally easy and comfortable.
E: Because apg pointed it out, and I think it matters: I definitely have the same privilege he does, which changes my perspective, and when I’m on the other side of the table and evaluating candidates I consistently try to make that count less. One tip I got: I often get to review resumes to decide who to ask for a phone screen, and I’ve asked the internal recruiters I work with to send me resumes with no identifying information. I don’t know how it changes my recommendations, but it’s one more avenue that keeps any implicit bias from slipping in, so I suspect it’s worthwhile.
I don’t do biographical interviews anymore, and so I don’t even look at the person’s resume at all, until after I’ve submitted my evaluation. The interview feedback my company uses is based on our principles and each interview attempts to evaluate the candidate against a set of them. I’ve not been here long enough to have strong opinions on it yet. So far, I’ve enjoyed the attempts the framework makes to be unbiased, and feel that decisions have been fairly obvious as a result.
The interview I’ve been doing is a systems design thing, so technical, but not coding.
I’ve been trying to steer the ship away from the “resume -> phone screen -> broader phone screen -> in person” pipeline for a while, but it is fairly ingrained.
Could you share some examples on this? I suspect I’m about to be on another round of interviews and am curious how this works.
Principles – each of the interviews has a set of these that can be evaluated. Sometimes the interviews overlap in these principles, which is fine. The interview feedback I fill out has specific questions related to the interview, with a big focus on the principles.
I appreciate your perspective and willingness to point out that it’s considerably easier as a white male.
I’m not convinced that being a white male helps, though that may depend where you are. At my place of work they have quotas with the effect that women get places more easily.
I enjoy coding interviews to a large extent but it is always a major relief when they’re over. And I’m never fully relaxed in any kind of interview. I do very extensive preparation. My mind tends to go blank when asked for examples from my past experience. And, I’m probably not very good at interviews because in 25 years I’ve only ever landed one job offer after an interview. That’s included two rejections from FAANG companies. So by my example, being a white male with lots of experience is not enough on its own. Only time I’ve changed jobs it was to a competitor where they already new me well from working with me for the same client - and that didn’t last long because my original company bought them.
Hmm. This reads to me as if you don’t believe that white male privilege exists, and instead of responding with ways in which I’ve benefited over the years, I’ll ask you to see if any of these 160 things happen to apply to your situation, especially the work place section? I get that the name of this website may sound pretty scary, but I hope you can look past any potential bias there and give it a fair read.
Fun story from my past: I once worked for a company that announced a new diversity and inclusion “council” which was literally comprised of 3-4 Director level folks, 2-3 senior managers, all of which were white and male. I wish I could say that I had trust in this initiative, but needles to say that it was adjusted after some of us raised very publicly that this seemed like a questionable choice.
Try not to worry about whether or not the deck is stacked against you (some folks will insist it is, many will insist it isn’t, some will try to gaslight you about your own experiences either way); there are probably easier wins (resume polishing, practice being interviewed and general social anxiety defusing tricks, better negotiation techniques, and so forth) than worrying about things you can’t control. Good luck to you!
It’s natural that loss of privilege can feel like oppression. I try to take comfort from knowing that many other peoples’ real oppression is really being diminished.
I really enjoy coding interviews. I like high pressure/challenging scenarios, it’s a situation where preparedness pays off and I am a very social person. It’s also a great opportunity to learn more about how other people do their business, and how they interview people. Getting interviewed makes me a better interviewer.
I don’t mind coding interviews as such, but I do mind the kind where you’re expected to spend a lot of time on them (especially the “homework” ones).
Yes. I love coding interviews. This is an employee market, if I fail, l’ll interview somewhere else. Companies should be more worried about their false negative rate and the time they waste interviewing people, but they don’t… Their loss. To make a moneyball analogy: there are a lot of undervalued players on the market.
I’ve been on both sides. And I considerably prefer the interviewee side, I rarely learned something or been challenged/amazed on the interviewer side.
For context, I am as privileged as /u/apg, YMMV.
Yes, I do. Rather, I like the effect they have on job hunting as a whole. I don’t think it’s ever been easier to increase your income than before since you can prove your skills in a few hours. Solve some problems, get a bump in comp or move over to another company with a different wlb. The true interview is the first 3 months working with people, not the first few hours spent locked in a single room with them.
There are people who enjoy, but this question may apply to any kind of interview. Most people don’t enjoy at all any type of interview. It does not matter if you are a software developer, a pilot or a teacher, it is not a situation we are used to be and when we are not able to show our best, we feel sad.
On the other hand, I see a lot of complaints on the coding interview with regards to white board interview and questions. What I see on those complaints is that people actually do not propose a real solution to it, just pure complaints.
I made more than 130+ interviews during the last 3 years as an interviewer. During my interviews I never focus on the code the person writes, but if I can work with the person. I look for values such as: the person makes questions, can we communicate properly, can we have work together on a programming challenge. What I find wrong is to ask something very specific like RBT and expect to implement and remember it: this is super specific and does not tell you if you will succeed in the position.
For me interviewing its more about does this person match the team and knows how to work in team/pair.
I don’t mind them as much now that I learned how to do them… its just a lot of effort. With that said… I’m also not that good at them. lol
On the doing end, I basically have always said no to homework interviews (they’re usually open-ended but just really boring and seem time consuming). An exception has been one place that had interesting questions (sort of “Advent of Code”-style stuff, where it’s not algorithmic prowess, more just a bit of elbow grease and a fun result). For face-to-face stuff, it’s been usually pretty awful. The worst was doing a really simple algorithm problem on a board, and then having the interviewer try to press me on index math (my original solution involved some zipping and stuff and the guy was like “let’s stick to C-ish semantics”). Very frustrating stuff. I also messed up a “string reversal” exercise through my own fault (it was easy in theory!) I feel like it’s a good test of “can you solve advent of code stuff fast”.
On the giving end, we have a vertical slice of a django application that we use for “full-stack”/backend roles. I think it’s been very effective. People pass with flying colors or fail entirely (we really try to make people pass because of all the stress etc involved, and try to reassure people that we are really not trying to ding anyone). And we try to have a lot of varied angles, so people can show off what they know. Again, we are trying to make people pass. Seeing people succeed is extremely gratifying and I’ve learned some stuff from watching people do it.
We aren’t doing fancy algo stuff so we don’t talk about fancy algo stuff (unless candidate brings it up and it’s a fun conversation). We are a CRUD-y webapp with a bunch of legacy code, so we test CRUD-y webapp skills on an unknown codebase.
I wonder how big the error would be if we assumed Pi to be exactly 3
Okay, so on duck duck go: “pi * 25000000000” results in 78539816339.7 And when setting pi to 3 we get 75000000000
So this is a pretty big error: 3539816339.699997
Did I calculate this correctly?
You calculated correctly, but the answer to “how big the error would be” is it depends :). There are two ways to look at the error of a measurement or a computation. The first one is the one you tried above – the absolute magnitude – which tells you half the picture.
The other half is the relative error. The difference between 3 and 3.141592 is 0.141592 or about 4.5%. A 4.5% error is good enough for some things (e.g. weighing scales at the farmers market) and really bad for some other things (e.g. high-precision scales for the chemical industry).
Both of these tell you useful things – you generally want to keep both in mind when making any kind of assessment.
(Edit: oh yeah, one other interesting thing. Relative error is adimensional, it’s just a percentage. Absolute error has whatever unit you’re measuring, and sometimes that tells you a bit about how big an error is in physical terms. In your case, if we’re talking, say, 3 539 816 339 molecules of water, that’s a tiny fraction of a water drop. If we’re talking 3 539 816 339 grains of rice, that’s about 410,000 cups of rice which is, like, a lot of rice).
Ah! That’s good to know thanks :) So generally I would want to additionally examine the relative error and see how it relates to the absolute magnitude between two values.
My last two clients write their backend services with swift and it’s going well for them. Those services are running on linux. I honestly don’t see much usage of swift outside of the apple ecosystem. I should add that my client’s business is an iOS app.
Does anyone know of a homebrew version of this?
I’m using an OLKB. I love it more than anything. It took a second to adjust, but less time than I had thought. It has ruined all other keyboards for me, and now as the days go by I’m convinced there needs to be laptop with an ortholinear keyboard built in. OR I need to somehow change my laptop to be some combination of portable computer, keyboard, mouse, and portable screen
I think the future might an iPad type computer with a seperate keyboard that you connect to it by Wifi / Bluetooth / USB
AKA the ”naked robotic core” computer concept.
I bought a HHKB last year, and it’s been ok. A lot of people seem to over-hype it, and it might be a bit too expensive. There is a difference though, even if you only conciously realize it when using a cheaper keyboard. The default layout (control, backspace, tilde) is also something I miss on other keyboards…
There is something about ergonomic keyboards that I find “visually” unappealing. I can’t put my finger on it, it might be that they seem to use more space, or that the concept of a split keyboard is just foreign to me.
I’m a big fan of the HHKB but did apply some mods, mainly the Yang ble controller & bke redux domes (ultra light).
A controller with firmware customizability made a big difference in my usage. The domes make it slightly more tactile but the difference isn’t that noticeable IMO.
That’s my general thoughts as well. It’s way too expensive for what it is… But if you have one and you use the command line a lot, it is really quite ergonomic for the situation.
I luckily got mine for about 100 euros less than it is currently being sold for (at least on Amazon), but even then it is a lot.
How do you get around the lack of CTRL and ~ in the command prompt?
CTRL is located where caps lock usually is.
What do you mean by lack of CTRL?
I really enjoyed my HHKB, but yes, definitely expensive. Now I’m on a much cheaper OLKB and I can’t even use my HHKB. I may have to sell it finally.
I have this as well and I am quite disappointed… the keys get stuck every couple days and forces me to restart (I’ve cleaned it a number of times). Rather disruptive…
What I want to see is a way to put an ortholinear keyboard into this type of laptop. I’m very excited to see what these people come up with.
The MNT Reform is designed to have the keyboard swapped out. I’m planning on building a column-staggered variant when mine arrives.
Cool! I didn’t know about this
Yeah, it would be really nice to be able to fit an ortho keyboard + trackpoint into a laptop. Maybe there’s even enough space that you could have the keyboard slightly movable.
It’s down to licensing.
If specifications are open and there’s no restriction (e.g. patent licensing) so that everybody can freely design, make and sell specification-compliant modules (including the container/shell itself), welcome.
Otherwise, good riddance.
I am not optimistic, as I couldn’t easily find the information on licensing in the website.
The ars writeup of this makes promising sounds like
But as you point out, there’s no information on licensing, etc. in that handwaving. I’m optimistic that it’s at least on their radar as something they think is good for them. That said, I’ll be waiting to see what evolves once things are shipping before I get excited.
I do hope a system with field repairability by its owner becomes available. Because the ones I liked (Thinkpads) are going away from that lately.
FWIW they did say on Twitter:
Without this there’s a solid chance that new parts will cost more than a new laptop, which in the real world will kill the idea off.
Good point about licensing. This needs to be open. It would be cool to see something like this but similar to Pine64 openness
I’m pretty optimistic about this. It sounds like they paid enough attention to everything that techies were talking about. I think they’ll come up with reasonable licensing as well… at least in the beginning. I don’t think they’ll do a worse job than Apple regarding hardware lockdown.
Good reminder of history and interesting idea. For me the biggest take-away is the fact that a lot of stuff was just built for fun.
It would be cool to explore OSs by using these existing projects. Personally, I still want to explore building something from scratch.
Great talk!
Thank you!
The real problem is that a handful of big players heaped complexity atop complexity, creating a morass of web “standards”, many of which are user-hostile to begin with. This led to the situation where it is nigh impossible for anyone but big players to create and maintain a usable browser. So here we are, with the chickens coming home to roost.
Full disclosure: I’ve been involved with an alternative browser effort for many years; edbrowse.
I kind of want to start my own browser project. I was thinking it could be useful to work on one part of the browser engine. that way there could be multiple projects and others would find it easier to start their own browser. Though I need to research what’s out there.
Here’s our documentation on how to contribute to Gecko and Firefox. We regularly create good first bugs to help newcomers get to know our processes & practices. Contributing to Firefox can be done in HTML, JavaScript, CSS, C++, Rust and even Kotlin.
We also have a chat room on Matrix for new contributors, #introduction:mozilla.org
If you’re interested in writing your a mobile browser from scratch, our Android team has created a set of components to build your own browser, so you can pick and mix. I think it could be a great start, but obviously mobile-only.
In my experience Mozilla isn’t great at reacting to outside contributions. For example, I opened a PR half a year ago in the eslint-plugin-no-unsanitized repository and while you initially reviewed it very fast (thanks for that!) by describing what needed to be changed, there hasn’t been any activity on that PR since I applied the changes you recommended.
This hasn’t been the only encounter where this happened. Sometimes I open bugs on BMO with a patch to fix it and the patch only gets reviewed multiple months later, if it doesn’t get ignored entirely. I understand that you’re all very busy and managing outside contributions is hard (that’s why Google doesn’t want them!) but I wish Mozilla would improve on this front.
Ironically, my best experience with contributing to a Mozilla project has been submitting a patch to Thunderbird, which isn’t strictly a Mozilla project anymore :).
I can’t even think of a contribution where I would be reasonably sure that it would be accepted.
I think Mozilla has made it clear time and time again that people technically proficient – enough to have an opinion differing from Mozilla’s – are outside the browser target user group, and therefore their opinion is irrelevant.
To be honest, the best way to get things in Firefox is probably to get it into Chrome and then hope that Firefox copies it after a while.
Let’s see how this turns out for vertical tabs.
Thank you! I’ll check out those links.
I am looking forward to its use with the
//go:embeddirective for embedding static files in the compiled binary.While the third-party solutions work well (e.g. go-bindata), I usually only need 1 or two files embedded, so having that supported out of the box is a welcome addition, especially when I can combine it with the
io.FSinterfaces so the files don’t need writing to disk for occasional operations which only know how to read from real disks.It’s pretty cool. Cleans things up nicely!
Godot is in a great spot and just keeps getting better. I’m hoping you’re right on this one!
“…encourage co-operation across borders” well said! I actually never considered geopolitical impact with processors. could you point me towards some reading, or share insight?
I’m not an expert on RISC-V, but I know that both MIT and China work on improving it. There’s also political will in Europe to build a European CPU.
Had to look that up. Latency jitters between 3-10ms. Figures.
3-10 ms is acceptable latency for MIDI though?
Drummers will disagree.
But even then, It isn’t just 3-10ms latency; It is the latency from bluetooth + whatever other latency in the latency chain.
It all adds up.
(Am drummer) A total latency, i.e. of the whole chain, of 3-10 ms is okay. 3-10 ms for a single MIDI message is 3-10 times more than one would expect :-). Also, jitter matters enormously. A constant latency of 20 ms is annoying, but you can sort of live with it if you really try. Constantly jittering between 5 and 20 ms, on the other hand, feels like you’ve had one too many drinks.
Two months later, RISC-V, TOML, Gemini and Godot has good traction and Zig is still very promising (and under development - not Rust-levels of safety yet).
MIDI over Bluetooth, on the other hand, has delay and setup issues. I’ve tried it and I have lost faith in it.
Three months later, there are some MIDI over Bluetooth hardware solutions that claim to be able to send signals with a 3ms delay. I tried the CME WIDI device. So far, it has been a complete hassle to set up on my Android phone, but the delay is very low. It also feels fine to play with a MIDI controller connected to a Linux machine, where Jack then redirects the MIDI signal via Bluetooth to the WIDI device.
Struggling like crazy to make my new Pinebook Pro into a usable environment.
I am so incredibly on board with the idea of inexpensive portable hardware as a force multiplier for people who don’t enjoy the privileges I do, but wow it has been an incredibly bumpy ride.
Today, after the latest incident of sleep not working and draining the battery because I forgot and just closed the lid before going to bed, I’m getting a red LED on power on. The forum says I should try booting with the battery disconnected, but honestly I’ve been a bit too intimidated to try disassembling the thing because I’ve seen about a dozen Youtube videos of people lacerating themselves trying to do the same, and I’m partially blind..
I had hoped to be able to contribute to the software ecosystem around this thing and maybe help some people, but I’m beginning to think that despite having at least fair to middlin’ tech chops, this may be over my head.
Dude! I’m also reliving the 90s with a Pinebook.
Nice! Have you managed to get yours to sleep without draining your battery?
I’m actually really enjoying it in just about every other way. Battery life is amazing. Keyboard and display are surprisingly good, and porting apps to AARCH64 is fun :)
Mostly by plugging it in. I need to add a dev rule by hand so the damned backlight will turn on.
Cool! I have one sitting in my office. I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet. But once I’m done moving this weekend, and my client work has wrapped up for the month, I’m going to see about getting it into a usable place. Though I have a thinkpad that is further along.
I’m interested in ARM and cheap hardware that can do a lot. How we do make computers that work well in constrained environments? Hope you write something up :)
I absolutely will do a write-up.
I’ll simply say that I’ve found both the forums and the Discord/matrix chat community utterly invaluable in my journey.
Tonight’s minor adventure was figuring out how I wanted to back up my work to my NAS, and I eventually came around to a temporary NFS mount and rsync to copy over the changed files.
One thing to note: My biggest ongoing struggle thus far has been trying to get anything like sleep to work.
By default, currently, under the stock Manjaro 20.08 shipped with the Pinebook Pro, if you close the lid and walk away for the evening your battery will be dead by morning.
Apparently this is due to bugs in the Trusted Firmware software the system uses, and apparently it’s subtle and painful to fix, because I’m getting conflicting reports on whether the folks who hold the context are just burned out and have temporarily run away or maybe that it’s being worked on.
It’s an open source experiment so ultimately it’s not like I’m blaming Pine64 for this, but it certainly puts a dent in the laptop’s usability as a portable work device. For now, with pandemic isolation in force, I just leave it plugged in and powered up at night and that’s getting the job done :)
It looks like this is closed source? That seems a bit of a shame for a Linux product.
I’ve got to respectfully disagree.
I think having vendors provide and support their closed source products on Linux represents a major step forward for the platform.
I am super pleased that a fully open alternative in this space exists, but I use and love 1Password and am chuffed to hear about this, because right now I have to use sub optimal browser extensions or WINE hacks to approximate this.
Yes! I agree wholeheartedly. It’s a very good sign for the Linux desktop platform as a whole that companies are willing to write and support closed-source desktop applications. Unlike Windows or macOS, Linux desktop machines are much more diverse and backwards compatibility is much less guaranteed. It’s also worth mentioning that distributions and communities usually step up to support particularly important pieces of proprietary software (think Steam) on unsupported distributions and configurations.
Since 1Password is commercial software, making it available has to make financial sense. While they might be supporting Linux primarily as a marketing ploy to technical people instead of as a result of the number of Linux users, I think it’s more likely that they’re doing this because enough existing users would install it on Linux machines if given the option. That means that there has to be some significant overlap between 1Password users and Linux users.
Yup that’s absolutely true. They get the question often enough that there is (or was) a blurb in their support thing about using WINE as a hack-around, or at least their was before they came out with 1PasswordX for Chrome/Firefox.
1PasswordX is an OK solution, but I really REALLY missed the native app as I use it for things like secure note storage and credit card autofill as well.
Yeah, right? What does this even offer that Bitwarden doesn’t?
Probably nothing, but that’s not the point. The point is that there are a decidedly non zero number of users who are already bought in to the 1Password ecosystem for any number of reasons, and providing first class support for them on Linux feels like a super clear cut win to me.
As someone working to migrate off of apple platforms, I’m pretty happy this exists!
Two thing I like in 1Password compared to BitWarden are 1) the secret key which is totally random, used to encrypt/decrypt the database entries and only stored locally and 2) TouchID and FaceID support on macOS and iOS.
(Disclaimer: I switched from 1Password to BitWarden about 15 months ago, mostly because it had become clear that there was no way to stay up to date with current 1P features without also having Agile host my password store. I didn’t mind paying them, but I’d like to bring my own sync, please! It was also getting trickier to keep running 1Password under WINE, and most of my daily stuff had moved to a Linux desktop. So my basis for comparison might be out of date.)
BitWarden’s iOS Touch ID and Face ID support has gotten quite good lately. They also integrate with iOS password management much better than they used to. I have never tried touch ID on a mac so I don’t know if it works with that.
The things I still miss from 1Password are:
The things I prefer about BitWarden are:
The hard tie-in to the service component is really what stops me. I wish Agile would copy BitWarden in that regard and let people self-host but pay them the fee. I cheerfully do that because I want to support them, I just don’t want them to have my passwords.
It is only me, or were they trying too hard to imitate Steve Jobs when he introduced the PowerPC->Intel switch, like when the “confessed” to have been using the new architecture “before”, even though that looses all meaning in a recorded environment?
This is intentional. They named things as successors of previous iterations of the same technologies – universal 2 and rosetta 2 – while making a reveal presentation that feels just like the same as the Intel reveal in the past. This is an emotional trick to show old-time Apple users that just like that previous transition, this new one will be successful and OK.
It’s obviously intentional, that’s what I’m going after – it’s forcefully obvious, even if (as mentioned above) their re-enactment doesn’t make sense.
This is an advertisement for a Kickstarter and does not contain the type of technical content worthy of a Lobsters post.
It links to these technical places:
Those would’ve been better submissions!
These are what I wanted to see, and I’d have been tempted to hide/flag if the content given had lacked any links to further technical detail.
But since that wasn’t the case, I think there’s value in highlighting the Kickstarter so people can support the project if they’re interested?
I’m often tempted to write comments like this on “does x belong here?” threads then abandon them to avoid spamming up the discussion further. So, an actual suggestion:
Perhaps in cases like this where there’s a good reason to link to the PR material, we could encourage people to also add a comment or blurb calling out any relevant links or technical information?
Agreed! I think this is squarely on-topic. It’s an interesting product that inspired me to read about https://pwnagotchi.ai/ and other associated devices. I learned a lot from reading the reading this page and searching the web for the topics mentioned. The USB stack fuzzing idea is interesting. I think I might try exactly that on a piece of embedded equipment I have lying around.
It might be. Or it might just be performance art, as the kickstarter in question does not even exist.
If it ships, I’d sure like to see a link to the promised firmware and hardware source. It’ll be an interesting gadget if it ever becomes real.
The heart of it seems to be this very impressive beast https://www.ti.com/lit/gpn/cc1101
Probably a real swine to write drivers for, but as usual, ti supplies a bunch of libraries you could use.
Moore’s Law has ceased to be “Doubling of CPU speed every 18 months”. Actually, it never was.
Actually as stated by Moore, it was “Doubling the number of transistors every 12”. That has reach the peak of how much plain CPU speed that can be delivered.
What is still happening, is more and more powerful and weirder and more exotic chips like this.
Can you explain what makes this a weird, exotic, impressive beast? Almost all of my deep knowledge relates to server hardware, I haven’t worked with microcontroller-scale things for about a decade.
Read the data sheet I linked to for the full details, but basically…
It’s a radio receiver transmitter (transceiver) that frequency hops over 300-348 MHz, 387-464 MHz and 779-928 MHz bands and converts from an RF baseband signal to a stream of samples (i/q’s) and then encode/decode data from that via a bunch of different modem algorithms, plus a bunch of nifty stuff require to make it practical (sync detect, address and crc check, …) in a tiny (2.4mmx2.4mm) package.
In The Bad Old Days that used to require a lot of fancy rf circuitry, maybe an fpga, certainly a dsp, and a hell of a lot of very fancy maths and very smart code.
(Source. I do this stuff for a living)
Ahh interesting. Yes, this is why I needed an explanation because I don’t do this stuff for a living. But certainly want to learn more. I can’t do much with a data sheet just yet
edit: And thank you!
I’m on the software side of the picture so there is always more for me to learn on the RF/hardware side, but I at least know where the various tasks are done on the device I work on.
There are a lot of these super smart super tiny chips coming on the market… the down side smart equals complex to drive, and chip tends to mean you get what you get, if the chip doesn’t do what you want…. get another chip (means PCB redesign) and have a massive task of rewriting your drivers.
If you ever pull the bluetooth standard and print it out, (you will need to buy a new bookcase), you get an idea of the scale of “tiny,cheap,super smart aka insanely complex” I’m talking about.
That said, a lot of things that were very expensive, are becoming available at commodity prices. In some ways dumber, someways less customised, but with 90% of what you want.
And that will probably improve in time.
yes i’d love to know as well!
i guess if it is paired with another ti µc it should be quite easy. i have still an ez430 chronos lying around, which wasn’t too hard to write code for, given the examples etc.
It would be nice if they marked PDF links more visibly.
I don’t think so and so you are wrong because what determines posts to be worthy of lobste.rs is the users, and I am a user of lobste.rs :)
I don’t think a flat “you are wrong” is correct when the post has already been spam-flagged over ten times.
It’s just a joke about “x on lobste.rs should only ever be y” purity posts. You know what they say about death, taxes, and arguments about what lobsters “is”…
2D C99 Game Engine. I had been committing every day for several months and then had to take a break or burnout. Spinning things up again feels difficult, so I’m going to plan some smaller stuff out, and then hopefully finish a plugin system.
that’s exciting. a simple game engine is on my short list of projects to step up my C skills. What would you say is a good first milestone for making one?
Getting a graphic up on screen should probably be your first milestone. It was mine. It got the ball rolling from there.
Oh duh. Yeah that’s a good point. Don’t worry so much about every single detail. Get something on the screen. How do I move it? Remove it? Add more of it? etc… Thanks!
I don’t feel experienced enough to tell you. I’ll let you know when I finish making one. :)