Author Archives: Lou Franco

Interview question advice: What’s the difference between an interface and an abstract class

I met a recent CS graduate last week who was wondering the right way to answer “What’s the difference between an abstract class and an interface”. In his case, the question was in a Java context, but this applies to C# (and other .NET languages).

Here are the keys to answering a question like this:

1. You need to actually know the correct and complete technical answer

I’m not going to get into a detailed analysis of the difference. There are a few StackOverflow answers that are worth reading if you don’t understand. I will say that this question is fairly basic, and if you don’t have a firm grasp of the answer, you should do more than just read some websites — write code that uses interfaces and abstract classes and really try to internalize the difference. Look at examples of both in the standard library and think about the difference it would make if an interface was changed to an abstract class or vice versa.

2. Understand why the interviewer is asking the question

If I ask this question, it’s usually during a pre-screen. Since I believe the question is basic, I just want to make sure that the candidate meets a minimum qualification to be asked hard questions. Given that, I expect a fairly quick and smooth delivery of the answer. I never need perfection, but I don’t expect much struggling with this concept.

But, the real reason I ask questions like this is to see how the candidate explains technical concepts. I want to see that they know how to organize their thoughts and express themselves clearly. Nearly every programming job ad says something about spoken and written communication being important; it’s on the interview that you show that you have this skill.

3. Be able answer beyond the basics

You should know the mechanical differences like syntax and limitations of each, but if you stop there, you have only given a minimally correct answer.

A better answer follows this basic recipe

  1. Explain how they are the same (differences are only interesting if there are similarities)
  2. Explain the mechanical differences
  3. Explain when one is better than the other — then explain when the other is better
  4. Give concrete examples from your work or the standard library. Pick an example where the choice isn’t obvious, and work in your best project.

By the way, this works for any “What’s the difference …?” question.

Blogging follows doing

This year when I set my goals, I added in a monthly renewal on the last weekend of each month to reflect on how I was doing. I just completed one a few days ago.

On my physical goals related to diet and exercise, I am doing fine. My social goals like volunteering are also doing well. But, I am having a big problem on my goals related blogging/writing and personal programming projects.

I thought it would be easy to just write a blog entry to get out of the rut. When that failed, I thought, “start small — start with a tweet”. Even that was kind of difficult — I didn’t feel I had anything to write about. I could always tweet a new job opportunity in Western Mass. or link a jobs-to-be-done article, but in terms of an original tweet, I had nothing.

Looking over my previous non-linking, non-retweets, I did see a pattern — if I actually did something interesting, I usually had something to say about it. Armed with that, I decided to just tackle a couple of easy projects — the latest was upgrading my harddrive, which was worth a tweet shoutout to iFixit.

None of these things are worth a blog entry, so I have to get cracking on bigger things. The key for me is that I don’t think it’s worth opening up my CMS to blog until I have done something on one of my personal projects.

The other takeaway is that forcing myself to do some monthly reflection on my goals helped me to get out of a rut, so that’s something that has to stay.

What I look for when I hire

I recently wrote this in an e-mail to an ex-colleague who was looking for advice on hiring:

Here’s what I look for when I hire:

#1: I worked with them before and I know them to be great
#2: Someone I trust (who is a #1 for me) says they are a #1 for them (worked with them and says they are great).

After that, it’s been luck — I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot lately — getting a little better

Here’s what I look for:

  1. They must program on the interview — I don’t care which language, but I want to see something.
  2. I want to see evidence that they have set and met long-term goals — ones that take perseverance — not just ones that are what they are paid to do for work, but something that augments that (or even something unrelated). So, leading and completing a big work project is not what I am looking for, exactly, because you don’t have a choice to do or finish them, and there are rewards all along the way (your paycheck)
  3. Along those lines — self-improvement — learns about new tech, languages, etc. Tries to build things on their own.
  4. Community involvement — could be twitter, a blog, going to dev groups or even stuff totally unrelated to tech (volunteering, etc) — if not, it’s nice if they have broader interests (music, art, etc). There are a lot of user-generated content outlets out there (StackOverflow, CodeProject, GitHub, FooCamps etc. — do they contribute to any of them)
  5. Some evidence that they read our company’s website, the blogs of our employees, twitter feeds, etc. I can’t understand why people don’t prepare for interviews — but I take it to mean that they don’t prepare for anything.
  6. Must be able to write — I want a nice cover letter that is a convincing argument for why I should hire them.
  7. Some evidence that they care about their work and are self-critical
  8. They must be experts in something — I don’t care what it is, but whatever it is that they are doing, they must know it deeply. If they have been web-programmers for 5 years, I should be able to ask any question I want to about HTTP life-cycle, JavaScript debugging, etc. They can’t have total blanks on the core stuff they are supposed to know.
  9. For very entry-level, I teach them something simple in one context, and then later ask questions where they need to apply that knowledge.
  10. They must explain things to me that I don’t know, and I have to be able to understand it.
  11. I’m looking for go-getters — so, I like people that reach out to me (I am easy to find) — that follow up after interviews — do more than what is expected in the interview process.

GPL for Portfolio Pieces

On my Atalasoft blog I wrote that I thought programming job applications should become more portfolio oriented, and

that means working code that I can run, and access to all of it. Probably the best thing is a running website and a github repository. If the software is hard to run, then a video walkthrough or screenshots are acceptable substitutes.

To learn more about what I want this to be like, I am starting to prepare a portfolio for myself.

One issue is that it’s important to decide what license to apply to it. If you don’t decide, then the default license is all rights are reserved, and the code isn’t very usable by anyone else. Since this code is meant just to show others what I’ve written, I guess it could be ok, but I actually don’t mind others using the code.

Another issue is that I intend to post code for projects that will be for sale (iPhone apps). If I put a permissive license, like BSD or MIT on it, then I run the risk of anyone being able to compete with me with my code and my permission.  But, not open sourcing real code would be against the whole point of making a portfolio. Fake code doesn’t represent programmers well.

I think Zed Shaw has the right idea about using GPL, not so much the why, but in what ways GPL helps authors.

Using GPL, I get these benefits

  1. Use of the code requires attribution
  2. You can’t put GPL code in the App Store
  3. I can still grant BSD licenses on a case by case basis, and perhaps only on portions. To do so requires the developer to get in touch with me
  4. Likewise, I can still choose to sell or give away commercial licenses, if I am contacted.

To me, github and the entire idea of a portfolio is to make code more social. GPL helps maximize that.

Take a Picture of What You Eat

I recently discovered Time Management Ninja, and love the tips on it. A post from last month was about how taking photos can improve productivity:

Photos capture information that you cannot get via written notes. Taking pictures of an object or a document can provide more insight that simple notes.

The important thing is the ease of capture. Taking a photo is so easy that you’ll actually do it.

I just started keeping a fairly detailed food journal on paper. I have tried to do this on phones before, but they are just way too slow — even though the apps have access to tons of nutritional data, I really didn’t care about that — I just want to know a few things, like what it was, how much I had, and basically how healthy was it. A picture pretty much gives me the first two instantly, then I want to just tap a rating.

And, it’s effective. In 4-Hour Body, Tim Ferriss [1] cites a study that looked at photo food diaries:

Dr. Lydia Zepeda and David Deal of the University of Wisconsin–Madison enlisted 43 subjects to photograph all of their meals or snacks prior to eating. Unlike food diaries, which require time-consuming entries often written long after eating, the photographs acted as an instantaneous intervention and forced people to consider their choices before the damage was done. In the words of one participant: “I was less likely to have a jumbo bag of M&Ms. It curbed my choices. It didn’t alter them completely, but who wants to take a photo of a jumbo bag of M&Ms?”

The researchers concluded that photographs are more effective than written food diaries. This is saying something, as prior studies had confirmed that subjects who use food diaries lose three times as much weight as those who don’t.

I’ve been working on a way to do this (mostly to scratch my own itch), and will have more to say on that soon.

[1] Ferriss, Timothy (2010-12-14). The 4-Hour Body (p. 60). Crown Archetype. Kindle Edition.

Systems not Tactics

Today I was reminded about why I find Ramit Sethi personally motivating:

What you are seeing here is the game being played around you. Clueless people look at random tactics. They jump on the fad diet, the shiny budgeting software, the fanciest productivity tool. Smart people see behind it and realize any individual tactic is just a random tactic — but the SYSTEM of testing different approaches is profoundly important.

A lot of what he writes about is not just learning some technique, but implementing an automated system that forces you to apply something positive (even if not ideal).

For example, the video in the post explains how having a personal trainer forced him to meet his fitness goals because the cost meant that he would never miss an appointment, and the trainer’s advice was clearly better than him winging it. In his financial advice book, I Will Teach You to be Rich, he showed how to use automated savings and investment tools to make sure you save. Automating will beat your best intentions every time.

This resonates with me because, as a programmer, automating is second nature, but coming up with ways to automate your life are hard. Some things that worked for me:

  • CrossFit — It’s cheaper than a personal trainer, but not cheap. The payment is automated, so it motivates me to go, and the results have been amazing. Like a personal trainer, the workout regimen is also automated — just show up and do what they tell you.
  • Food Journaling with consequences— At my CrossFit box, I joined a club where we have to food journal or get punished with hard exercises. We also agreed to eat well, but journaling is the part that makes me stick to it, because we have to show our journal at the meeting. Sometimes I just pre-write the whole day in the morning, and just follow it — then my eating is automated — I can’t snack, because I didn’t write it down. Also, the meeting is automated, and the members hold me to my commitments.
  • (total self promotion) My iPhone app, Habits –It helps me remember to do some simple things like call my mom more regularly. I also useTraxItAll to track progress towards my goals. Finally, idonethis.com automatically sends me an email each day to ask me what I got done — I now have a nice calendar where I can see each day’s accomplishments.
  • Putting planning activities on my calendar — I made it a 2012 goal to spend time on the last weekend of each month to plan out the next. I put these dates in my calendar as if they are meetings, so I don’t schedule anything else.

Unlike a computer, we aren’t forced to follow our programs, but figuring out ways to automatically generating feedback, reminders, and motivation will help you stick to your plan.

Job seeking advice from a 16 year old

A couple of weeks ago I called my “little brother” Josh for his birthday (we’re in BB/BS). “Guess what I got,” he said, “a job at Big-Y”

His sixteenth birthday was the first day that he was eligible to work, so it’s pretty amazing that he (1) got his working papers already and then (2) actually got a job. It’s tough out there for young job seekers (not to mention everyone else), so Josh must have been lucky or connected.

Not exactly.

Josh has been really determined to get a job. So much so, that he went to Big-Y a few months ago and filled out an application even though he wasn’t qualified yet. He has an awesome resume, so the manager told him to come back when he turned sixteen.

“What?” you must be thinking, “How does he have an awesome resume? I thought you said that he couldn’t work”

Sure, he couldn’t work, but he could volunteer. Josh has been volunteering hundreds of hours a year since he was 11. He has served food at the community center, worked parades as a junior Lion cub, helped out at the local Food Pantry, was a member of his high school’s Key Club, and we have done a few BB/BS volunteer activities together — last month we helped artisans move in their wares for the BB/BS Annual Winter Craft Fair.

I asked him why he volunteers so much, and he said that he had a blast, met great people, and wanted to get used to working several hours a week for when he was able to get a job.

If you know any teenagers who aren’t old enough to work, but will want to when they can, you might want to share Josh’s advice. I told him he should teach a class.

Can a content site be better with Ads?

I noticed that Horace Dediu, the founder and main author of asymco, recently started adding sponsored content to his site. Typically, his articles are data-backed analysis of the mobile market. To get a quick idea if you don’t know it, see this recent entry titled Revolutionary User Interfaces. In it, Horace uses data visualizations to show how Apple disrupted the phone market with multi-touch.

It happened despite having a clear, front row view of the transition of the industry from mobile voice to mobile computing. The shift in the basis of competition from “connecting people” to “connecting people to data” ended up being a classic disruptive trap. Many will argue that it was the failing of individual managers. Perhaps, but how did they conspire to fail simultaneously?

When you see disruption happening, it’s natural to seek out a cause, a pivotal magical “force” or event that enabled the weak to humble the strong–the proverbial sling that enabled David to defeat Goliath.

The article is worth reading, but what I wanted to point out was how his sponsored content is as interesting as a typical article. This one for Textastic reads almost as a follow-up.

With the new touch-based devices of today, we are seeing similar migrations of utilization to new jobs to be done. The simpler creative tasks migrate first and the advanced (or emergent) uses follow. Like with the microcomputer, the first common creative task for tablets happens to be text-based editing.

I have been giving a lot of thought to this kind of advertising, where it is as useful as the content to the reader. This is more than just relevance and unobtrusiveness, as I think advertising from The Deck accomplishes on sites like Daring Fireball. Instead, it turns advertising into something that I would read eagerly and perhaps miss if it were gone.

2011 Lessons Learned

While looking over my 2012 goals, I realized that I hadn’t really thought about 2011. This year I want to practice regular renewal and recommitment to my goals. In the past, I achieved my goals more or less, but that wasn’t through a practice of recommitment. It was a chaotic result of my other obsessive behaviors. I am working to make this a more repeatable process this year by constantly evaluating where I am.

To that end, this is what I learned in 2011.

This year brought big changes in my professional life. Atalasoft was acquired, changing my job somewhat (more focused on product development, but with a more aggressive roadmap and bigger team). Having this focus has helped make sure we deliver our roadmap. Additionally, it has let me direct all of my energy at product management, which brought me to consuming the works of Horace Dediu, Clay Christensen, and exposed me to the “Jobs to be done” framework, which has had a profound impact on my thinking. While trying to find out more, I met Bob Moesta, who generously spent an hour teaching me more details of the framework with plans to talk more about it.

Lesson #1: Focus allows you to make outsized gains in the area you focus on.

This year, I have found a purpose that has helped me improve my networking. Drawing from Seven Habits, I have long thought that the best “uses” of a network was to help people find each other for their mutual benefit, but I haven’t been good at thinking of ways to do that proactively.

Through my work with the local Regional Employment Board, my exposure to so many job seekers and employers, and my belief that high unemployment is the most important problem to help solve, I have set the broad goal of trying to make connections that result in hiring by myself and others. Additionally, I have blogged some practical tips about job seeking for programmers, and I tweet every good local tech job I see.

Lesson #2: A goal centered around a purpose is easier to achieve

My biggest goal of 2011 was to “get in better shape”, which I defined as having a BMI and health measurements (blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.) within normal ranges. I started the year trying out 4-Hour Body and trying to get back into running, but when that didn’t work, I finally joined Pioneer Valley CrossFit in June. In December, I got serious about eating better and adopted a paleo diet. I started 2011 at 180 pounds and ended at 153, with 80% of the loss after June. More than that — I am more fit than I have ever been in my life.

Lesson #3: Be willing to change tactics quickly if they aren’t working.

This year I hope that I apply these more consciously. What did you learn in 2011 that will make 2012 even better?

2012 Personal Goals

I was inspired by Heidi Grant Halvorson in the Harvard Business Review blog today to work on my 2012 goals:

Get specific. When you set yourself a goal, try to be as specific as possible. “Lose 5 pounds” is a better goal than “lose some weight,” because it gives you a clear idea of what success looks like. Knowing exactly what you want to achieve keeps you motivated until you get there. Also, think about the specific actions that need to be taken to reach your goal. Just promising you’ll “eat less” or “sleep more” is too vague — be clear and precise. “I’ll be in bed by 10pm on weeknights” leaves no room for doubt about what you need to do, and whether or not you’ve actually done it.

This is similar to the SMART philosophy of goal making (good goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely), which I try to follow.

Another influence on goal setting for me is Covey’s Seven Habits. The last one, Sharpen the Saw, suggests we work to increase our Mental, Physical, Emotional/Social, and Spiritual/Renewal capacity.

To that end, I developed these personal goals for 2012:

Mental

  • Publish 75 blog posts
  • Work 3 hours per week on personal coding projects
  • Publish 3 apps

Physical: work out 5 days/week, and

  • Be able to do 10 dead hang pull-ups
  • Be able to do 10 ring dips
  • Be able to bench press 155 pounds
  • Rx 30 workouts at CrossFit
  • Eat paleo food on 275 days

Social/Emotional

  • Do 100 hours of community service
  • Eat meals with 25 different groups of people

Spiritual/Renewal

  • On last weekend of each month, spend at least two hours alone somewhere outside and unpopulated. Look over goals and plan the next month.