Just make sure to rebase every time you start work to avoid merge conflicts, but yes, this is the single most effective git workflow for small and probably larger teams too! I'm in a small team where the lead dev comes from a top SV company and he introduced this workflow and it works great.
I used your app in the past. I love the design; my only gripe (and what ultimately caused me to uninstall) was being unable to sign into my HN account. Other than that, great job with it.
FWIW I think Boreal is the greatest ios app for HN. It has great features like filters and comment collapsing. Also allows commenting, voting and publishing.
I work with TopTal and this is no throwaway account. I see very little reason to publicly slam a company one failed to get into and no reason to call it 'stupid'. Most companies do whiteboard questions during interviews, and Codility challenges are equivalent to that.
What he's relating shows a lack of competence in the interviewing process from toptal.
This indicates that the people running the company are junior engineers who think brain teasers and algorithm challenges are how you test for a good engineer. This is based on the common excitement that young people get in completing these kinds of tests.
When you get sufficient experience, you come to realize that this is not what makes a good engineer. Very few companies and very few projects are cutting new grown algorithmically. But building a system that can be maintained and extended without being brittle, this is much more important.
Very hard to find white board questions for that.
Also, while many companies to white board questions, any well run company with a good engineering culture will make that less than %10 of the interview process. On toptal this seems to be the extent of them actually learning about you as an engineer.
For that reason, his comments are very good... and your smear that he "failed to get in" and the implication that he's somehow biased is, in my view, a punch below the belt.
I don't agree that testing algoritmic skills shows 'a lack of competence in the interviewing process'. Quite the opposite, but I respect your right to have this opinion so let's leave this aside.
On the other hand though, publicly calling a company 'stupid' because one does not like the way they recruit employees is more than a punch below the belt. If I don't like someone's recruitment process I don't apply for a job with them, but don't go to Hacker News and call them 'stupid'.
I didn't downvote you, but seeing as the whole point of this company seems to be to hire good coders, if one thinks their method of ranking coders is stupid, so is their whole company.
Why not? How else would the next guy know not to apply for them? If I had known this before, I wouldn't have wasted my time with them in the first place.
Thanks, this was exactly my point. I used to like doing these kinds of problems when I was a second year comp-sci student. I was also a C purist. But then I grew up and learned that there are far bigger problems in software development world than some puzzle or making 100 line programs as efficient as possible in C.
Now I think about usability, design, etc. of a system and wonder what the trade-offs are when choosing one design over another, not to mention time and cost trade-offs.
Isn't this what any respectable client submitting projects on Toptal should look for? I don't think I'd want a junior dev diving head first into my project without first understanding the requirements and presenting me with different trade-offs, etc. Unless ofcourse Toptal wants to be a platform for lazy college kids asking help on their assignments.
I know you understand these points, but I'm just adding this for future readers.
I have done codility tests in the past (with another company) and I would say that its the worst way to interview someone. You need to code your solution to accuracy in the defined time and pass all test cases. Its not that the problems are super hard, but the fact that the company is not interested in understanding how I solve problems and does not have time to interview me is a huge turn off.
Yeah I've done many whiteboard interviews and I'm well aware of algorithmic problems, complexities, etc as I have a BSc and an MSc in computer science. Codility problems do test for those, but their problems are usually some sort of puzzle or brain teaser type of questions that I have hardly encountered in my work.
It's not that I "failed" to get into Toptal. I refused to take the codility test after seeing it as I didn't see any point in doing so. I'm sure I could solve those codility problems in 30 min. each if I practiced similar problems for a couple of weeks, but why should I?
I told them this, and their condescending response to me is why I called them stupid. Programming is a vast field, and not every programmer is going to find such puzzles "interesting and challenging".
I'm working to implement an SDK in Swift+Realm.io and make it general purpose.
myOfflineManager.POST(
url, // the URL to call
header:header, // [String:String] header for this call
params:params, // [String:AnyObject] the body for the call
storeResponse:true, // if i want to store the server response in the DB (for example to get Photo)
fromCache:false); // if you found already an response into the DB then take it right now
For receiving the response I'm implementing NSNotificationCenter, so i know the status:
queue // the call is putted into the DB
progress // i'm starting the call
done // call is done
and of course the server response ;)
Everything is working right now, but ... is strange that there are no free open source SDK.
Maybe i can release it on GIT.
I'm European and once put my feet on the table when talking to a collegue on the phone. I did it because I was curious of people's reaction. Another colleague saw it and she was stunned to say that least. I quickly apologized, but that's a heck of a cultural difference spanning across the pond.
A stat that I can share. My iOS Hacker News Client which is currenty number 4 on AppStore has between 550 - 600 daily unique users and roughly 2.5k daily sessions on average.
#1 Do you mean the status bar? I could easily remove it, but don't you like to know what time it is? Removing the status bar could be an option in settings in the next release.
#2 I will give this suggestion a thought. Now you can go back to the previous view by swiping right. So theoretically the back arrow could be hidden too.
Heh - yes - the status bar. I don't mind it being there, in fact it should be. But on my iPhone 5 it renders in some shade of eggshell when the rest of the interface is white. In my humble opinion, it should be the same colour as the rest of the UI.
