From Junior to Senior

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 […]

ParkenDD is an app that shows you parking spots available in different cities in Germany. Take a simple function from their project. There’s an extraneous return in the failure case. Using nil coalescing operators in general is a code smell to me, so most of the success case I’d change. The flatMap should be much […]

Swift is a language that walks softly and carries a big stick. It is very good at helping beginners get going and it’s flexible enough that you can do some terribly complicated things with it. Generics are one such terribly complicated thing that I’ve been meaning to simplify for a while because every single time […]