Note: The first 3 episodes of the interview series can be found here, here and here.
Question 1:
You have the shared document open and the phone rings. The interviewer, at the other end of the line, starts with a thick accent:
– What does ls * do?
You cannot believe your ears: it sounds easy. Really easy. So you answer in the line of “it lists all the files in the current directory”. The interviewer follows up with one or 2 questions on how it really works and you answer about the star being passed as a parameter to ls and how the binary interprets it in some way that it gets the entire directory walked over and its contents listed. Simple!
Note: This is a text about the project work at one of my previous employments.
Introduction
These days everybody talks about Agile, Automation, DevOps and Continous (whatever), without truly understanding why things have gone in this direction. After all, for many years, a software project had a couple of well-known steps that needed to be followed, like:
Full, thorough planning at the very beginning and from time to time, before significant milestones;
Development, lots of development behind closed doors;
Lots of manual QA work, little automation with some custom-written testing framework written from scratch by one of the developers;
Infrequent releases (e.g. every year or even every other year or so); releases were thoroughly prepared and tested, with code freezes for (sometimes) months before the Day.
Even if everybody knows these days that such approach may have been a bad way of doing things, it actually worked for many years because that was the way the world expected things to work. There were many constraints, e.g:
Note: you can find my comments here for the similar event held in 2015.
Another year, another AWS event; for this year they have changed the venue and brought in more speakers, unfortunately of inferior quality compared to Sebastien Stormacq, the sole speaker from 2015. This year twice as many people registered, roughly 500 people queuing up for the early morning registration.
The main difference from the last year was the presentation content being split into 2 tracks, the “technical” and the “business” rooms, each with their own focus. On the technical side the following topics were covered: