I recently went through a big round of interviewing and job searching for SW Engineer roles. I wasn’t fully prepared, and don’t think I could ever be fully prepared. Interviewing is hard and strenuous and nerve wracking and I honestly hate it. But the preparation I did helped. So this post is to collect some of those preparation points, and I hope to do some other separate posts about particulars.
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Year of Travel continues
My abstract got accepted!!
So now I need to figure out if it is even practical to get through the Visa process for China. Oh, and to create some content to share. Heh.
Article link – building a career in open source
The bit about imposter syndrome was interesting. I definitely feel insecure in my work at times because I see all the flaws and feel my limitations. But that is often an illusion, and working with a good manager helps that by giving positive feedback on what you are doing right.
The comments about networking and reaching out are also good points for most software engineers to be reminded of.
Security integration
I’m working on a security story that has drug on for close to 6 weeks now. It is the result of an early decision to turn off TLS because the mechanism for setting up the certificates wasn’t ready and just turn it back on later. Yeah, that never goes well. (This decision happened before I came into the team, so I won’t point fingers.)
I’ve finally come to a small epiphany about security. We talk a lot about security algorithms and strength and attack vectors and vulnerability surfaces. But the math and analysis parts of security seem like much more straight forward problems. There are lots of great tools for those things that should be used. The _real_ challenge to security is integration. Getting the certificates in the right places. Turning on those little configuration switches in all the right files. Specifying the right ports and routing traffic through firewalls and load balancers and TLS terminators. That seems to be where the practical complexity lies.
Maybe some day I’ll have an epiphany about how to make that happen more smoothly. 😉
Teleworking can be a good thing
I have had a couple conversations where the topic of my work arrangement has come up. I still keep in mind this article. http://martinfowler.com/articles/remote-or-co-located.html
Effectively, I think having a good manager who knows the team and how well they are working is key. Having team members who have integrity and want to get the job right helps, and pair that up with good remote-worker skills and tools and you can be successful anywhere.
Of course there are some jobs where you need to be with the equipment, but if you are writing software that often isn’t the case.
Interviews – Coding questions
So after I posted to the new interviewing category yesterday, Slashdot posted an article that fits right in. While the article was a quick read and got my wheels turning, I have some comments on the article and how accurate it is.
Interview skills – a new category for the blog
Years ago, during yet another round of corporate uncertainty, I took some advice that you should be keeping up your interviewing skills and do some interviews to keep in practice, even if you don’t want to change jobs. And you never know when you might find an awesome offer. So I made a goal to do at least one interview a year sometime during the summer. It has been good for me to push my boundaries, talk to some cool companies, and get a feel for what I’m lacking in an interview.
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Two conferences in three weeks.
I thought I should get back to it with a quick post. In the last month I attended two conferences, one was OpenStack Summit in Vancouver BC, and the other was an internal conference for my company in Phoenix. Both were good experiences, and I got to see how my company is throwing boatloads of money at the cloud. Made my decision to stay with cloud feel better, as my transition to seeing a teleworker had me nervous about how long it would last.