One of the reasons I love mechanical watches is that I've never tried to fully understand them, and the idea that there's a purely mechanical thing, that does something seemingly so simple yet magically and reliably, gives me a sense of wonder and appreciation for engineering and art.
I'm really on the fence about whether or not I want to read this amazing looking article or just live on in ignorance :)
Not the person you were replying to, but I'm a morning workout person (mostly weightlifting but also some cardio-type stuff). Yeah, empty stomach. For weightlifting I may have a protein shake with just enough water and almost always a banana and that's it. Doesn't bother me. I'm not sure if it's optimal (or if I could even tell what is optimal) but weights are still heavy and I still make progress so I'm happy with it.
Mainly for the wealth of online videos & other training materials I've found to help learn the lifts. I do recommend the book and the app costs a few bucks if you want it.
The best successes I've had for making a starter (I've done 3 or 4 by this point) is with rye flour. Once it gets going I switch out the flours gradually and it's been good. If you haven't used rye before, might be worth a shot.
We design and build life-sciences instrumentation equipment. In simple terms it's a petri dish with electrodes that read electricity from living cells. Uses in research, drug discovery, personalized medicine and finding treatments for all kinds of diseases (ice-bucket challenge!).
We need a developer and a quality engineer. Our development is a mix of embedded firmware and C# desktop application for Windows. The QA role would focus on automating as much of our testing a possible (regression, data validation, performance, etc...) so that the team as a whole can move faster.
For both positions, ideally 1-3 years of experience in C# and Python but similar languages & skills are ok.
Can you explain why the new person's influence fades so quickly? The new team member who says "I know how to fix all of your problems" on day one looks like an arrogant jerk.
The team member who starts to fit in and then says to the right people "It looks like our system has a memory management problem. I've got a lot of experience with this type of issue. Can I help out with designing a solution?" is far more likely to get into a constructive dialog and may move things forward.
If the OP wasn't brought in with the goal of saving a project that was in dire straits, then trying to fix what you think are the biggest problems immediately isn't going to go over well.
What about when you get an email from a website you just signed up for that opens with "Hi, Anigbrowl! I saw that you signed up for my site..." and is "signed" by the CEO. If you found out that was an automated email and that the CEO didn't really type it up personally, would you be equally upset?
I have two examples to share. A simple whiteboard question I ask is "Write a function to compute interest on your money. You have $X and I'm going to give you y% interesting for Z years."
I'm generally happy if they don't ask any questions and write a simple interest calculator. Most people ask some questions about when interest is calculated during the year. Then, if the questions haven't gotten us there yet, I ask them to modify it to a compound interest calculator where you can also contribute some money every year.
I've never had anyone who didn't understand the concept or what I was after. Or at least I didn't have anyone who admitted to still not understanding how it worked.
Two people stand out.
One of them immediately tried to write a recursive function and got lost. Then started over and tried to calculate a one-liner to do compound interest without looping. Couldn't get it, started over with a for-loop and failed to return in the proper place: the code was returning a value and then immediate next line was more calculation.
The second let me explain the problem and then said "I'm sure there's some library call for calculating compound interest, I'm just not sure what it is." Full stop. I explained that I wasn't asking for the library call, I was asking them to work up the algorithm and write code that did it.
They repeated the statement that there was a library call for it but they didn't know it and that if the interview was going to be about the specifics of library functions then it wasn't going to be a good interview.
In both cases these people passed a phone screen focusing mainly on experience, algorithms, design, etc... Since then I've adapted the phone screen to cover more of Steve Yegge's points [1] and I actually include a small coding question on the phone.
I don't think my system is perfect, but in the last round of hiring the people who made it through the screen were almost all good technically and weren't offered positions because of fit with the team. I'm sure there were a few people who might have been good that got filtered out by writing code over the phone but at the time I was willing to risk that vs the time commitment for the rest of my team to do on-site interviews for someone that could be DOA.
I've used GitHub's online edit for this very reason, but mostly for other people's repos. If I'm reading a README or docs to figure out if I like a library or want to use it I'll submit pull requests from my browser to fix typos or unclear/incorrect sections.
It wasn't a critical update, but one that wouldn't have happened if I had to fork/clone/push/pull-request it.
A friend turned me on to the Manager Tools podcast[1] which is pretty good. They make 1:1s one of the key parts of their philosophy and have some info online about how they do it[2] including the email that sets it up and a sample checklist form for doing it.
I've done these at two different companies both with a team that I grew entirely myself and had already established friendships with before starting the 1:1s and with folks at a new job where I inherited the team. In both cases they were immensely successful in building rapport, establishing a professional-vs-personal relationship, and getting me in touch with how folks are feeling about their work & company. "How was your week?" or "You looked pretty stressed out about the latest feature requests. Everything ok?" works wonders to get people to open up.