My approach is to provide 3 topics of conversation (no right answers just talking):
Let's say the person is applying to be a dev in product P.
1 how would you build an mvp for P? Which stack, what are the main issues, how would you deploy etc (usually I ask if it were a side project , so I can see which technologies are in the intersection of fun and reliable for this person)
2 what would be a moonshot feature for P? (If you had a perfect AI lib or unlimited processing power or devices spread all over the world)
3 if you had to find someone to take over your job (for you to manage the new one), what would you look for?
is there any good terminal assistant? something that accepts these kinds of queries but with in a cli, preferably without the need of constant internet connection
I learned french in 3 months aprox. while living in France. Ive arrived there without much knowledge of the language. First weeks I was feeling like an alien. Then I started to understand but couldn't speak. Then I started to use translate and dictionary to build some phrases beforehand to be able to be polite and ask the questions I wanted. After 3 months something clicked during a talk I was watching, I not only began to understand without having to think but was able to ask questions to the French guy on my side about the talk (it was about a ML algorithm). I am a native speaker of a Latin language (Portuguese).
I strongly disagree with the author. I've introduced tens (maybe hundreds) of people to code and starting with code (instead of a GUI) and preferably lower level (like C or VB) code is the best way to keep people motivated. What I've found is that people tend to settle in the less difficult path. After teaching python, no one cared to learn C, after teaching things like dreamweaver, no one cared about html. Even when they realised the benefits, they already had a tool that was good enough. If your objective is to simply make people more maker, ok, but I yet have to meet someone that would follow the described path.
possibly migraines? it started when i was around 23 and I had the same symptom (unreasonable back/neck pain). I just started to have headaches after visiting a neurologist and getting medication (pamelor), in the first month of medicine, the back pain stopped. after some months of headaches (and medication) most of it stopped. try to see if the pain correlates with coffee, sleep and fat food. everyone has certain triggers and they may take a while to appear. if I'd drink too much coffee, I'd have migraines in the next day. eating fat food on friday would just appear as pain on sunday or monday...
In my company, side projects are divided into two groups: products or toys. Both can be done during work hours without problem (if you continue to deliver your sprints, of course). Your work should always be deletable (you should keep version control somewhere non local) and your peers should always be able to see your code (asking or not, If it is in a company computer, everyone in the company has access to it). We also incentivize presentation on new technology or topics that emerged from the projects and usually people pitch each other their projects for new contributors. Projects considered products (that the programmer has started expecting profits at some point) should consider our non compete policy: if the product is in the same field as one of our products, our company has the right to be the first investor, with a minimum of 5% and cap of 15%. The valuation process is a bit dense to explain here, but several ex coworker are now partners with their own companies. The system works well but we have to watch out for talent retention. Usually the new companies are SaaS that replace part of our needed logic and cost us less to use than our ex coworker salary.
2 what would be a moonshot feature for P? (If you had a perfect AI lib or unlimited processing power or devices spread all over the world)
3 if you had to find someone to take over your job (for you to manage the new one), what would you look for?