They work and some people really find them useful.
Some time ago I've noticed that a few of my friends really enjoy going through newsletter emails and finding out about items that are on sale etc. They wouldn't necessarily look for a newsletter signup form on a website, but when a popup appears something clicks in their brains ("OMG, I really need this!") and they sign up.
I don't like these popups but well, most of the time I'm just not their target.
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that there were times when I actually got converted by a popup.
When you think of that, if it offers something that's useful to you, clicking on it feels so natural and you don't analyze it too much.
Wasn't twitter also measuring success in number of users and growth, marginalizing their losses?
For now it seems like they're still only a picture-sharing app that's popular right now. Obviously they're doing a lot to secure this position, but I wonder if they'll be able to maintain user's engagement for a longer period of time.
Are you angry about wasting 2 hours of your time or not getting the job?
Keep in mind that a lot of companies use automated tests to filter candidates, not necessarily in the most fair way.
They're simply not able to do a whole interview with everyone as it's extremely time consuming.
I'd say don't worry about it too much. If you have the skills you'll find plenty of good companies that will want to work with you.
Unfortunately, job interviews are not as predictable as how code works. Even the best devs I know get rejected once in a while. :)
Think about it - there's 2-3 people (interviewers) trying to asses whether a person has the skills for a job and is a cultural fit for the company.
All of these during an 1-2 hour long chat. That's virtually impossible to do right, they can only guess.
What I love about Paper (compared to Google Docs and similar tools) is it's simplicity. Formatting options are extremely limited, so all you have to do is just to type and it'll lay the document out for you.
This is actually the best feature, since you don't waste time adjusting tab stops and figuring out how to make bullet lists work (which was like 50% of my time when writing documents in regular editors).
I think both approaches are fine, depending on context.
This will definitely work fine for software that's delivered to the users. I don't really care about Chrome's or Gmail's version, especially since the update process is transparent to me. The APIs should be versioned on their own and everything is fine.
On the other hand, I really appreciate when semver is used by libraries (jars, gems etc.). From developer's perspective it really helps with updating these dependencies in your own code - a quick look tells you whether it's just a simple bugfix/patch that probably doesn't affect you or something more serious that you should be careful with when bumping dependency version.
Because of that, I wouldn't call it an anti-pattern. I'd say it's rather one of possible approaches that will work fine in some cases and not so well in other.
Personally, I think of buying a domain as a form of procrastination rather than the first step of starting a business.
It gives a feeling of achievement while staying in your comfort zone (seriously, it's just choosing a name and paying ten bucks, how difficult is that?).
What I noticed to work is reaching out to people, telling them about your business or project and getting their interest.
Getting the first clients puts more pressure on you, but also gives a huge motivation to continue working on it.
I didn't realize the importance of all the "admin stuff", before the our newly hired sysadmin came to me and asked if I could help him figure out how to deploy the project I was working on.
This ended up being a looong chat about monitoring, redundancy, architecture, security... you name it. What I've always thought of as installing and configuring software turned out to also touch designing the software so that it works reliably and is easy to maintain.
I don't think I'll ever have plenty of sysadmin skills, but knowing even the general idea of what's important to sysadmins helps a lot. Also, being able to become another interruption in their day and consult ideas is priceless. :)
u2i LLC http://www.u2i.com @ Przemysłowa 12A, Kraków, Poland
u2i is a consulting firm with a focus on developing technology driven websites and web applications.
We collaborate with our clients to come up with creative solutions to their business needs, using our flexible and down-to-earth approach to delivering projects. We have experienced developers who are skilled in developing robust, scalable applications.
# Junior/Regular/Senior Developer ONSITE
We’re looking for passionate developers (either with experience or looking for a first job) to join our projects for Nielsen Social that provides analytic insights into social media, focused around tv-related activity. In our work we process the whole Twitter stream in order to generate various reports on TV and advertising. The application is currently deployed across more than 500 AWS machines. On the project we work in small teams and do pair-programming, moreover we have a daily contact with product team.
Ruby, Rails, Hadoop, Hive, SQL, Git, Linux, AWS
# Quality Assurance Lead ONSITE
We’re looking for a QA Lead to work on automated testing and data validation processes. The project you’ll be working on provides analytic insights into social media, focused around tv-related activity. We process the whole Twitter stream in order to generate various reports on TV and advertising. The quality of data in these reports is extremely important to our clients, so we need to have the best possible validation and testing processes. But the job is not all about technical skills - you’ll be the foundation of our Quality Assurance team, responsible for planning the release process and managing the QA team. You’re going to work with both the development and product team in order to assure the highest quality in the software we deliver to our clients.
Ruby/Python/Groovy, SQL, Git
More info at: http://www.u2i.is/hiring
u2i is a consulting firm with a focus on developing technology driven websites and web applications.
We collaborate with our clients to come up with creative solutions to their business needs, using our flexible and down-to-earth approach to delivering projects. We have experienced developers who are skilled in developing robust, scalable applications.
# Junior/Regular/Senior Developer ONSITE
We’re looking for passionate developers (either with experience or looking for a first job) to join our projects for Nielsen Social that provides analytic insights into social media, focused around tv-related activity. In our work we process the whole Twitter stream in order to generate various reports on TV and advertising. The application is currently deployed across more than 500 AWS machines. On the project we work in small teams and do pair-programming, moreover we have a daily contact with product team.
Ruby, Rails, Hadoop, Hive, SQL, Git, Linux, AWS
# Quality Assurance Lead ONSITE
We’re looking for a QA Lead to work on automated testing and data validation processes. The project you’ll be working on provides analytic insights into social media, focused around tv-related activity. We process the whole Twitter stream in order to generate various reports on TV and advertising. The quality of data in these reports is extremely important to our clients, so we need to have the best possible validation and testing processes.
But the job is not all about technical skills - you’ll be the foundation of our Quality Assurance team, responsible for planning the release process and managing the QA team. You’re going to work with both the development and product team in order to assure the highest quality in the software we deliver to our clients.
Some time ago I've noticed that a few of my friends really enjoy going through newsletter emails and finding out about items that are on sale etc. They wouldn't necessarily look for a newsletter signup form on a website, but when a popup appears something clicks in their brains ("OMG, I really need this!") and they sign up.
I don't like these popups but well, most of the time I'm just not their target.
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that there were times when I actually got converted by a popup.
When you think of that, if it offers something that's useful to you, clicking on it feels so natural and you don't analyze it too much.