From Junior to Senior

During my time at Lambda School as an iOS instructor I volunteered to design a SwiftUI tutorial. As I’ve said before, SwiftUI is not something that should be on your radar if you’re close to getting a job. Most companies are not using it and those that are using it should be more interested in […]

Whenever you start programming, you’re likely to find that amazing high of building things out of nothing. It doesn’t matter if it’s something simple or complex, usually that feeling will not recede and that’s why I’m here after 10+ years. However, one thing I struggle with everyday is the friction of coding something you don’t […]

tl;dr: Swift does not like when you try to access something that doesn’t exist (nil) and will crash if you try to access nil in any way: reading/writing a property that is nil, calling a function when the target is nil. Always use if/let or guard or nil-coalescing ??. The official Swift Language guide’s Optional […]

One of my students came to me with an interesting scenario. He received a verbal offer from Company A (think FAANG, the big leagues) and was waiting for the written offer. While waiting, a recruiter from Company B (another FAANG) asked him if he was interested in applying. He said yes, but that he was […]

In our first installment, we discussed some of the more frequently asked questions by aspiring devs and we explored a bit of what managers usually want to see in order to grant you an interview. In our second installment, we explored what to do once you do get an interview. There’s different types of interviews and different […]

In our first installment, we discussed some of the more frequently asked questions by aspiring devs and we explored a bit of what managers usually want to see in order to grant you an interview. Today, we’re exploring what to do once you do get an interview. There’s different types of interviews, so let’s explore […]

I’m writing this series because I get a lot of questions about the interview process. Here’s a quick example I received just a couple of days ago. I’ve gone through several courses – one by Angela Yu on Udemy, then 100 days of Swift and Take Home Project by Sean Allen. So basically I know some things […]

I’m a volunteer mentor at Underdog Devs, a group of people led by Rick Wolter who help the formerly incarcerated in their transition into the software industry. Recently, an interesting question came up in the group’s Slack, “I have an informational chat with a dev at my dream company, what types of questions should I […]

One of my star students is working his way through the high-level gauntlet: interviewing at Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Lyft… you name it. Interviews at the highest level are exhaustive and will test you on all aspects of development: CS concepts, platform-specific knowledge, team dynamics, your experience. Not only that but they will happen across hours […]

A student of mine came to me after fruitlessly trying to find a job. They were frustrated that they’d been applying for jobs and they’d heard nothing back. Some companies seemed excited about him but after a few interviews very few offers materialized. Those that did were lowballing my student in such an obvious way […]