#codinghorror

Of course Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a huge Sufjan Stevens fan. Of course she is. https://t.co/z9rOzgCToY

I’m currently reading Jeff Atwood’s book Effective Programming: More Than Writing Code. It was only $4.60 on the Kindle marketplace. I see now why the price is so low: The book is his blog, just organized into sections. I’m not complaining, it’s a great book. 

In any case, the book has a section on phone interviewing and which questions to ask. They aren’t stupid questions like “why are manhole covers round”. What does that really tell you about an interviewee anyway? Oh yeah, they can bullshit. I’m not downplaying the grand art of BS’ing, it’s a useful skill, but it doesn’t tell you anything about the interviewee’s programming skills. The seven questions recommended by Mr. Atwood are:

Write a function to reverse a string.

Get the nth fibonacci number.

Print out the grade school multiplication table up to 12x12.

Write a function to sum the integers from a text file. One int per line.

Print out the odd numbers 1 - 99.

Find the largest value in an array of integers.

Format an RGB value as a six digit hexadecimal string.

The one that grabbed me was the fibonacci sequence. It seemed like something every programmer should know, including me. So here it is in javascript:

function getNthFibNum(n) {   var fib = [0, 1];   

   for (var i = 2; i <= n; ++i) {      fib[i] = (fib[i-1] + fib[i-2]);   }   

   return fib[n]; }

More info on the fibonacci sequence.

Markdown is a simple little humane markup language based on time-tested plain text conventions from the last 40 years of computing.

you know it: