Guus Bosman

Another Tuesday night, another political nail biter. Ms. Clinton had her first two wins in over a month and the campaigns keep going on.

It's a raining quite a lot tonight, a welcome supply of water. There was even a tornado warning in effect for central North Carolina.

One of the most difficult decisions I make in my job is deciding on hiring a candidate. Make the decision well, and the team will grow with a productive team member and everybody's happy. Make a bad decision, and I'm in for a potentially long, difficult and distracting track.

There are many things I look for in a candidate, but for software engineers programming skills are obviously key. Over the years I've had good luck and bad luck when hiring new people, but I quickly learned that doing a good job interview is a lot harder than it looks. Now, years later, I feel competent, but finding a good candidate still requires a lot of attention and energy.

I always incorporate a little bit of coding during interviews, even during the phone interview. No matter how senior the job and no matter how many years of experience a candidate has, I'll always do it. It's amazing how a simple programming assignment can give you insight in how people think and write code. It's even more amazing that lots of candidates don't even pass a basic coding question. One of my favorite questions is this:

Given an array of integers, write a method that will return the largest number (the maximum value) in the array. The integers are: 4, 6, 2, 4, 11, 5, 3.

Yes, this is a real simple question, and yes, it has a real simple solution. I always make sure I carefully explain the problem, clearly state the assignment and ask the candidate if they understand my question. They can code it in Java or C or in the rare case that they know neither any other language. And yet, lots of them fail!

Clearly, this is only a first check. Beyond the first phone conversation and the simple coding questions there's a whole layer of other questions and coding assignments, but as a quick screening tool questions like this are hard to beat. If you're interviewing for technical positions, I strongly recommend you always incorporate such a quick test for basic coding skills.

Interviewing is hard, and it's an art I'm always working to improve. A book that helped me early on, and gave me a better understanding of the theoretical and practical aspects of interviewing is Hiring the Best by Martin Yate. I still occasionally re-read parts of it and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to improve his or her recruiting and interviewing skills.

(If you're in the market right now and are interviewing at my company soon: bonus points for reading my blog and mentioning it during the interview. Another thing I look for in a candidate is a genuine interest in the company and team that you may work with for the next years of your life).

We've driven over 28,000 miles with our car now, and this afternoon it's in the dealership for a maintenance service.

The dealership has a "customer lounge" which is pretty comfortable with nice leather chairs, CNN in the background and Starbucks coffee. And, of course, wireless internet.

I'm working on some Ruby on Rails code to generate an RSS feed. I like the framework, and it's great that I can run everything on my Windows laptop, even though in production we use a Linux distribution. In that sense I now have the platform independence of Java, but with the productivity benefits of a language and framework tailored towards web user interface applications.

Since a few days Google has enabled "street view" for the Durham/Raleigh area.

In the summer of 2007 this feature of Google Maps started with 360 degree photographs of New York and other cities, and now our region has been added. It's nice to see pictures of our neighborhood on-line.

(Thanks to Bull City Rising).