Critical Thought

The subject of interviewing, in most people’s mind, brings about a sudden onset sensation of dread and anxiety, the likes of which are fully capable of ruining one’s perfectly good meal. And at “On the Border”, no less. In fact, I was recently talking with a good friend of mine over dinner and the subject of job hunting came up. He then proceeded to explain to me all the horrific feelings he felt at interviews, how incredibly difficult it was for him to actually even make it through the interview with composure, and how he would be shocked if the people in the room were even satisfied, much less, impressed, with his performance. I, on the other hand, have always seemed to be fairly good at pitching myself to a company, and getting a home run in return (see what I did there?). So here it is: my own, personal no bullshit guide to not just getting through, but slam-dunking interviews. Keep in mind that while some of these things may seem utterly ridiculous and even counter-productive, they work and have worked for me, and I think they’ll work for you too. Continue reading

We’re going to keep this one short and oh-so-sweet. First of all, let’s take a brief moment of silence for the late, great Michael Jackson. *Sigh*

Now, on to Singletons. One of the most common assumptions I hear about the Singleton pattern is a blatant declaration to simply not use them – as if they could absolutely never possibly be useful for anything, ever. That is, of course, very lame.

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I recently revised my opinion of a little JavaScript framework you may have heard of. Frankly, I just got tired of simulating inheritance on my own, and Prototype does a better-than-decent job of class extensions, which is more than I can say for other libraries like JQuery or MochiKit.

However, that being said, it’s also worth noting the fact that Sam Stephenson – creator of the Prototype framework – is also a lead developer on RoR, which means that no matter what framework he’s building or what language it’s in, he’s going to make sure arbitrary – borderline useless – methods and helper functions plague the code base. Among these are things like Enumerable.zip, Element.makeClipping, and the oh-so-overrated Rails “dollar-w” Array method, $w. Now, one could argue that absolutely every inch of Prototype – or any framework, for that matter – simply consists of convenience methods and shorthand coding patterns – and that may be true. I mean, let’s face it, a framework can only utiliize a languages already-built-in capabilities – it can’t add to them. Regardless, I have become rather fond of using Prototype’s XPath parsing engine.

You may recognize some Prototype functions that utilize the XPath DOM traversal method like $$, Element.getElementsByClassName and
Element.getElementsBySelector. However, these are H-E-A-V-Y on your browser. How heavy? YMMV, but generally, pretty fucking heavy. So heavy, in fact, that Google decided this was a good idea.  The question is, do I care? Meh, nah, not so much. I increase browser performance like Chris Brown punches out pop starlets.

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I was recently listening to Fuel’s “Shimmer” (probably on the radio, since at any given point in time, it’s playing on either Q100 or Project  9-6-1). Then, out of no where, it hit me: Pip and Estella. Now, between the song’s debut in 1998 on the “Sunburn” album and it’s subsequent homicidal death by radio plays, I must have heard “She calls me from the cold” a million times if I’ve heard it once (hyperbole), but it only recently hit me what the song was about. At least, I seem to be able to – and without much work at all – cut pieces from various moments in the song and essentially recreate one of Dickens’ most memorable works: Great Expectations. However, considering the lyrics in “Shimmer” to be a literary act of epic proportions is a bit of a stretch.

(OK, John. Very good. Anything useful today?)

My point is that it’s not about the idea, it’s about the delivery.

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We’ll get to that in a minute.

Welcome to the blog! If you’re here, and you need an explanation, you’re probably lost. However, because I’m a good sport, you’ve reached the life and times blog of John Napier, a 20-some-odd year old variety-of-things guy. If you know the difference between NP-Hard and NP-Complete, or you feel slightly offended that I’d even ask, you belong here. If you think it’s possible I insulted your mother at some point in that last 60 or so words, you might find your time better spent perusing around some other, less-technical articles – in which case, you’re currently out of luck, as this is my first post. Let’s be on with it then.

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