OKR mistakes and how to avoid them

Using OKRs is popular at a lot of companies and has become a golden standard for a lot of companies. But just like how companies start their agile transformation because they heard it was good but without understanding what it is really about. I've seen the same thing happen where OKRs are misunderstood.

Go for C# developers: LINQ

When I worked in C# I loved LINQ. I also probably used it more than I should have. I have recently looked into some options to bring LINQ to a Go project so let me share some observations.

TL;DR: I don't think we'll see much use of LINQ in idiomatic Go. Nor should we desire it.

Go for C# developers: Unicode strings

 There are a few gotchas with strings in Go if they contain unicode characters.

Go for C# developers: Using keywords as identifiers

It doesn't happen very often but sometimes there is a variable name that makes sense that happens to be a reserved word in the language. In C# when this happens you prefix it with "@" so you get @new as a variable name. Not quite as clean with the prefix, but clear what is going on. Go takes a different approach.

What is the purpose of a test name?

Since I'm certainly a person who has been passionate about how tests are named, this article first made me a little upset since it almost suggested Test123 to be a good name. But as I kept reading I started to question my own crusade regarding test names quite a bit.

The social standup

Reading about a new idea for remote standups in the Thoughtworks Tech Radar reminded me of a few similar experiences I've had.

How to annoy your users featuring Volvo

I've owned a Volvo since 2017 and I would have hoped would have been fixed by a software update at this time, but no. So here are two things that annoy me pretty much every time I use the car. And then a third recent WTF moment.

A coding interview that never happened

I've conducted hundreds of interviews that involve some kind of problem solving and most of them involved writing the solution in code. And most candidates make the same mistake so I figured it was time to share a simple strategy that seems to have worked for me over the years when I was the candidate.

Fire and the US insurance system

It has been a long time since there was something interesting to write about in regards to relocating to the US. And it is a weird coincidence that once I started blogging again - something happened that makes me pick up this topic again. Since I lost a home in the Marshall Fire I'm about to learn a lot about insurance companies in the US.

Yet another tale from an interview - 13 years later

A little over 13 years ago I wrote something short about my Microsoft interview experience (now only available in web archive). Back then the format was a shocker to a naive swede and now 13 years later and several interviews later I figured I'll write something about my experience going through the Google recruitment process.

Rather than me writing a long thing here you might as well read this which pretty much explains my experience in general.

If that blog post is too long here are the important things from my own experience.

• You don't get a yes or a no - you get a yes or not now. Failing a Google interview is not a big deal since there are several reasons a good candidate fails to prove them selves. Get your chin up and try again.
• Be humble - if you are asked to implement Fibonacci with your 10+ years of experience just write the best damn Fibonacci the interviewer has ever seen with a smile on your face.
• Prepare - the cracking the coding interview book is actually a pretty good prep tool. I coded on paper one hour every night for weeks. And don't be over confident if you are asked a question from the book because those problems have more depth than the solutions shown in the book. If you are too lazy for that there is a rule of thumb I realized preparing; if you can solve something with a hash table or graph - you probably should. A lot of problems can be reduced into hash table or graph problems so learn how to identify and solve those.
• Think differently - Google do things on a different scale than almost everybody else. This means that things that are important to other companies don't matter at Google. That is; if you can speed up things by preparing the data for a repeated operation - you probably should, even if it means using thousands of machines and/or huge amounts of memory.

And most important; have fun. Even if I would not have gotten an offer I had a blast interviewing and would have tried again.