How to Improve Your Skills as a Programmer



How to improve your skills as a programmer from Yun Yuan

What to read
How to find stuffs to read

Learn from your bugs/mistakes
Symptom/Root Cause/How Found
Resources
https://dzone.com/
https://dzone.com/java-jdk-development-tutorials-tools-news

How to Improve Design Skills



How to improve design skills from Yun Yuan

Non-function features
Unique features
Rate limit - scalable, availability,  DDos

What's the bottleneck
How to scale
How to handle change - node added/removed/crashed

Better user experience
Thinking from client/user perspective
How they use it, what they would like to know



How to Improve Problem Solving Skills



How to improve problem solving skills from Yun Yuan
Misc
How to test it (locally) and easily
How to verify whether it works easily
What's the short comings of your current approach?
Whether there is better approach?

How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

How To Conduct a Technical Interview Effectively


Technical Skills
- Problem solving: not-easy algorithm questions
- Coding
- Design
Soft skills
- Communication
- Retrospect
  - Mistakes related with design/decision
  - What you learned from your mistake
  - Bugs/troubleshooting
- Eager to learn
- Be flexible, willing to listen, not stubborn

What questions to ask
- ask interesting/challenging questions
- Or questions that's not difficult but focus on coding (bug free)
- ask questions that can be solved in different ways
- Avoid questions that can only solved one specific approach, unless it's obvious(binary search etc), and you are tesing coding skills not problem solving skills

Don't ask 
- brain teasers, puzzles, riddles
- problems only because you are interested, you just happen to know, or you just learned recently

Know the questions very well
- Different approaches
- Expect different approaches that you don't even know
  - Verify it(use example, proof), if it works, the candidate does a good job and you also learn something new

Know common cause of bugs
- Able to detect bugs in candidate's code quickly

Give candidates the opportunity to prove themselves and shine
We are trying to evaluate the candidate's skills thoroughly, what he/she is good at, what not.
If you plan to ask 2 coding questions, one simple, and one more difficult, tell candidates
Let the candidates know your expectation

Make the candidates learn something
- If the candidate doesn't give right solution/answer, and at the end of the interview, he/she wants to know how to approach it, tell him/her.
Why?
- Candidates takes a lot of effort for the interview (one day off and commute), if they desire to learn something, and learning something make them feel good
- Prove that you know the solution and have reasonable answer, and not ask questions you even don't know much

No surprise
If you find issues/bugs in candidate's code or design, point them out
The candidate should have a rough idea about how he/she performs in this interview

Be fair

Phone interview
Prefer coding question over design question
- as design is partly about communication and it's hard to test communication skills over phone

About me - Jeffery Yuan (2017)


This would be a short list that about I am good at and what I should improve.
- I will keep updating it, and hope when I retrospect after 1 year, I will realize that I have improved  and learned a lot of things.

Strength
Retrospect and Learning Logs
- I like to summarize what I have learned, and write them down

Sharing Knowledge

Problem Solving and troubleshooting
- I like to solve difficult problems as I can always learn something from it.
- I also summarize how(what steps) I take to solve the problems, what I learned that can make me solve problems quicker later.
- Search and find resource needed to solve the problem
- See more at my blog: Troubleshooting

Proactively find problems and fix them
- such as find problems in existing design and code, and think about how to improve them

Be honest
- to myself and colleague about what I know and what I don't
Be moderate
- I know there are still a lot of things that I should learn and improve.
- I like to learn from others

Proactively learning
- Have a safaribooksonline account
- Like to learn from book, and people
- When I use Cassandra, Kafka in our project, I took time to learn not only how to use it but more importantly its high level design.
- Read more at my log System Design
Programmer: Lifelong Learning

Weakness - things need improving
System design
Knowledge about distributed system
Public Speaking
Presentation
Visibility

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