Credit: flickr / pixn8tr

I heard a horrible story the other day – someone had been off work because they were seriously ill, and a week before they returned to work one of their colleagues called all her clients and said she was never coming back.

Shocking, right? Bitchy! Horrifying. Disgusting behavior. Hurtful. The last thing you need. If my friend hadn’t come back and her clients had needed to find someone else… surely that is the last person they would have chosen, right?

You’d hope so. It’s hard to be sure though, and I too have been on the receiving end of something bitchy lately. Disparaging comments behind my back – to my friends! So of course they made their way back to me. And then this person decides that she wants something that I would be in a position to help her with, but instead of suggesting coffee and straightening out these “misunderstandings”… a passive aggressive strategy was employed.

I hate feeling like I’ve been backed into a corner and if I go one way I compromise my values, and if I go the other I get cast as the bad guy. I hate it. And so I debate what my strategy will be, discuss it with a friend, and go for passive aggressive in return (I’ve come to the conclusion that this is the only way to deal with a passive aggressive, but I still hate myself for it). But something else happens, and it seems like she’s getting what she wanted and I’m annoyed. And frustrated – because when you could get everything you wanted by being nice why, why, why would someone choose the route of the passive aggressive?

And then – I relax. Good things are happening, and anyway, I’m leaving. And really, I can dislike this person’s strategy, I can question her integrity, but – I have to acknowledge, that if I abstract to a higher level – we have the same goal. I want X to continue when I’m gone and that means someone to keep pushing it along. She is clearly interested enough to be that person – probably resents that I was doing it in the first place. Fine. I’m not going to be on her side here, but nor am I going to obstruct. So it’s likely that she will get what she wants.

Really what it comes down to is that I’m dispensable, and I’m OK with that. I handed over WISE to someone and I know that she’s committed, but she has a different skill set than me, and maybe she’ll come to have a different vision. That’s OK – I can mentor her, I can encourage, I can advise. But now – it’s her call, not mine. I give up control, but that means I get to move on to different projects.

Maggie and I just launched CompSci Woman. We have an initial strategy, we have some ideas, but the long term success of it means that we will be dispensable. We will need other people to help us, and we will welcome that as an opportunity to learn, and grow. We don’t want to build a small, steel and concrete structure that we can have complete control over! We want to build something organic that will grow. That means accepting a certain amount of chaos, it means accepting that the path might diverge from what we intended – it’s a compromise people make in order to be able to move onto the next project, the next adventure.

My manager, a while ago, asked me “how did you come to be you?” – at the time, I wasn’t sure if this was a complement or not. I’ve come to think that it was genuine interest from someone who’s had to learn to be an extrovert. At the time, I answered slightly flippantly, “I don’t know? Two years of boarding school?” – but here is the truth. I am the sum of the people I’ve known, the places I’ve been, and the experiences I’ve had. I have many more people to meet. More places to go. More experiences to have. The freedom of being dispensable allows be to go chasing them.

I think you can apply this to other things too – as a programmer, you can create job security by building something so complex and poorly documented that no-one else can maintain it (here’s how). Or – you can document, explain, write simple-as-possible, beautiful code and create – if not job security – career security through being visible, and awesome and having learned as much as possible along the way. Doing this properly, you become a multiplier – your effectiveness makes other people effective, and you’re responsive to being multiplied by others, as well. Of course, there may be a risk that you become a sequential prototyper – and I’m aware of that for myself – so as much as industrial research appealed to me when I looked for a job one of my criteria was, working somewhere where something I build will be deployed.

I don’t have a goal in mind, I’m not trying to build a solid structure – I’m trying to create a path. This blog is my trail of breadcrumbs, if you will. Disappointments are just obstacles, and so I find an alternative route.

I’m not an expert, rather an explorer. I don’t aim to control, I attempt to instigate. I don’t construct, I assemble and add water.

And then – I move on. Being indispensable is a cage that I don’t want to live in.

Credit: flickr / Stahl und Glas - steel and glass

Credit: flickr / mtlin

If you follow my Twitter, I may have already given away the ending to this! But as a continuation from my first round, here is my experience for my second (final) on-site with Google two weeks ago.

What Did I Do To Prep?

Things were a little hectic with the end of Extreme Blue and our trip to New York, and my plan to read The Algorithm Design Manual (Amazon) on the bus fell apart somewhat after the bus broke down, I went 5 hours without water in the heat and had a small breakdown. There was (apparently) a hilarious ending that I don’t remember in it’s entirety, which I won’t be sharing on the internet…

That said, I did make it through section 1 which was really helpful and the book actually contains suggested interview questions – great for preparation. I also read more of Java(TM) Puzzlers (Amazon) and started Making it Big in Software (Amazon – good read, mostly for once you’ve made it through the interview though I think).

How Was It?

It was fun. I got to hang out with smart people and code for four hours! My first interviewer was a woman, who was super nice and that really helped. My lunch-buddy was a woman too, so even though diversity at Waterloo is not great it didn’t seem that bad at the time! I don’t know if they do that deliberately or not. I didn’t find the questions too tricky and could answer them all, probably because I’d done enough preparation that I’d got into that way of thinking. I had 3 technical interviews, and one architectural one (designing an API).

Takeaways

Much the same as last time. Knowledge of APIs, particuarly String, Collections and arrays, but additionally:

• If coding in Java, know 1.5 features. One of my interviewers was more C++ and hadn’t coded in Java 1.5, and so when I used a for-each they asked the question, and I could answer – for-each loop added as of 1.5. Generics, too. I coded one question using Generics. Some people can find the syntax tricky, so if you’re going to use it (and IMO you should for good design) – know it.
• Immutability! In the API-design question immutability made the second part of the question (how would you change it so you can do X) immeasurably easier. Know when you want to have immutable classes, and use get/set and visibility accordingly.
• Trade-off’s between space and time. For another question, before I started coding I could say, I can do it in this complexity with this space overhead, or this (higher) complexity with no space overhead. In the end, we coded both. But I started with the easier one!

Overall

Unusually for me, I was happy with how I did! Despite having less time to prepare for this round, I’d remembered the stuff I’d gone over for the last interview and left feeling that I’d done the best I could.

Incredibly, I heard the following day (!) that I’d made it through regional review, my references were collected the day after and I received an offer a week after that. The HR guy in Waterloo was amazing in terms of keeping me in the loop and I got emails from two of my interviewers (one from each round) congratulating me. I’ve read (and heard) about people having a miserable experience interviewing at Google, but that was not at all my experience. The process took a couple of months, but that was because of my schedule and not them. I really liked everyone I interviewed with and everyone I encountered was super nice. I’m really excited about going to work there – and frankly still in shock that I made it!

I start in January. I guess I’m leaving Ottawa and moving to Kitchener/Waterloo. Bring on the next adventure!

Credit: xkcd

Credit: flickr / anabananasplit

Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture was, and remains, the most moving video I have found on the internet. It’s about how to achieve your dreams, but more than that – how to live your life.

The thing is, I don’t really seem to have the kind of dreams he had. So from time to time I think about that lecture and I wonder how to apply it when (as I wrote here):

…my dreams are normally very achievable – and depend more on my motivation, ability and finances than something rather arbitrary, like impressing one person for 45 minutes one Friday afternoon.

So lately I’ve been trying to find some things to dream of – these are so far somewhat nebulous – coding, creating, inspiring other woman to want to do the same.

What’s good is that I’m not alone in this. My friend Maggie and I have been talking about it a lot – what do we want to do? What are we worried about? How can we track down the projects that we would find exciting to work on within IBM?

We both want to be technical, at least initially, and we’re wary of being pushed down the manager track (or some other non-technical direction) – something that seems more likely if you’re a woman. Whilst we have really different interests and passions, we both want communication to be a key part of what we do. There are technical roles that require development and communication, but the thing is, where to find them?

Increasingly, I’m asking myself the question, what does my ideal look like?

I don’t have a clear idea yet – development, surely, and people – but can I get the people aspect in my downtime and through blogging? Ideally part of my job or some approved activity would be working to get more girls into computer science.

Is this too fuzzy? Do I really have to decide right now?

The thing that scares me about big dreams is you have to commit. You have to invest yourself in acheiving them. And what if you don’t?

The answer is in the lecture – you will still die, and you will die without an awesome story to leave behind.

A more terrifying prospect, perhaps.

Credit: xkcd

Having admitted that I seek out a high level of stress, it’s timely that I have, once again, gone way past the level of stress that I like to operate and hit the “woah this is damaging to my productivity” bit. I wrote before about How to be Crazy Busy Without Losing Your Mind and apparently I should be listening to my own advice.

Or not, because flying right out of my comfort zone is one way to stretch it. Best not dwell on other likely outcomes though.

Over the next two and a half weeks I will:

• Pitch at the Canadian Expo for Extreme Blue
• Pitch at the North American Expo for Extreme Blue
• Spend half a day in Toronto finding out more about GBS (do I want to be a consultant? Answers on a postcard, please)
• Head to Waterloo for my 2nd on-site at Google
• Pitch to guy working on awesome project
• Interest interview with another awesome project
• Leave for a 3 week trip to the UK

In order to get to New York, we’re taking the bus. What’s interesting is the thing I’m most freaking out about right now is not one of the Failure-Is-Not-An-Option items on the list. It’s the thought of 8-10 hours of enforced unproductivity each way. It occurred to me the bus might have power-outlets and wifi and I could use the time to Get Stuff Done. It doesn’t. (The distress this caused me was amusing to my teammates, and then worrying – their plan: get me drunk and/or medicate me. My plan: read The Algorithm Design Manual (Amazon)). The way back was going to be 15 hours on the bus, because we’re coming back via Toronto. I’ve ended up getting off in Toronto instead for this GBS thing, and, unable to bear the thought of 5 hours on the train will fly back to Ottawa after that.

Was the total of 25 hours or so on a bus distressing to me as a European, because my perception of distance is different? I think it’s just – what do you do on a bus? With no power or wifi, clearly not code.

HR Guy: What were you planning on doing?

Me: I was thinking about creating some wordles, but anyway it’s not relevant. The thing is I don’t cope well doing nothing.

He suggested I watch movies and sleep. I think he and I see the world very differently.

So, what is this other than another story as to how I’ve completely over-committed and over-scheduled myself, again?

I have put this huge stress on myself because I really want to have a job lined up for January by the end of September, preferably by the end of August. And I don’t want it to be just any job, I want it to be a great job. And this is a problem because my ideas of what I want to do are somewhat vague – I want to make things! I want them to be pretty! I want to make the world a better place! Programmers can do that, I know it!

IBM is not a place that deals in vague. I was speaking to this awesome woman the other week and she said, “I love PROCESS! That’s why I liked being a software engineer, because I liked the PROCESS!” Last week I saw her again at a lunch and learn – she was talking about how she found a great job at IBM and it was all about how she navigated the process.

I do not deal with the process well. I find it intimidating and overwhelming and confusing. I’m trying to create this mapping between my ideals, goals, priorities and things that will fit into the process. I’m asking for things – which I hate, preferring to operate on the “be awesome and people will notice principle” that has so often failed me and others optimistic enough to use it.

Our MBA is my career coach. He says things like, “When you’re in Toronto you should set up meetings with at least 6 people”, and I make a note that I must speak to multiple people, ask my Toronto-based mentor if she wants to have lunch, and ask more people if they are willing for me to email them my resume.

It’s a start. I’ll keep you posted. Meanwhile… can I send you my resume?
Cate Huston UK Resume Mod

Credit: flickr / gingerbeardman

I have the dubious distinction of being the intern, who on my self evaluation, had the biggest (positive) different between how my team rated me, and how I rated myself. I gave myself all average marks, bar one (initiative, +1). My 3 teammates evaluated me, and I only had one average mark, total, so I scored above average on every aspect.

The evaluation from my mentor was really good too, above average on everything bar imagination. A. Excellent. Constructive feedback on things I’m already working on (because she’s always giving us constructive feedback) – including: “Cate needs to be more willing to email people she’s been introduced to”.

As my manager gave me my feedback, I joked, “Oh so I don’t have to feel quite as inadequate as I do then?”, consensus was “no”. At the end  I said, “I’m doing okay then, great”. Yes, it’s good. Yes I’m happy with it. But I feel like anything less than “excellent” would be below the standards that I hold myself to. It wouldn’t be good enough.

Of course, now I’m wondering about my imagination. As a problem solver, do I want to be imaginative? How could I become more imaginative if I wanted to? Is it partly that what we’re doing doesn’t provide huge scope for imagination?

I also got feedback from the girl geek dinner talk I gave. I had a speaker score of 4.29, which I’m really happy with too. And after a week of tortured waiting and obsessive email checking, Thursday night at 5, I got an email from Google. I’m through to the next round! I guess all my preparation paid off.

It’s good for me to have a sanity check. I try to push myself every day, but I never feel like I’m doing well enough. I’m not going to be less hard on myself (relentless improvement, baby!) but it’s nice to know that other people think I’m doing OK. To take a moment and say, I might not be where I want to be, but I don’t suck.

However, and this might be ridiculous angst-y, I couldn’t help worrying – my professional life and my personal life are so amazing right now… it can’t be real, it must be about to fall apart.

Sure enough, mere hours after I wrote the first draft of this post I discovered someone had been saying things about me and a project I’ve been working on behind my back. The positive feedback came from more than 10 people. The negative from just the one. But which am I dwelling on?

Yeah, of course.

Credit: flickr / fofurasfelinas

Credit: flickr / mark knol

For those of you who didn’t know (or work it out), this is where I interviewed last week. It went well, I think – at least I feel like I did the best I could and whatever happens that will be helpful.

I agreed to an NDA, so I can’t write about the questions that they asked me. However, I can write about how I found it and what I did to prepare.

First, it’s Google – so I would never have applied had my friend who works there not talked me into it and referred me. I didn’t have a phone interview, since I was “local” I was invited on-site directly. I don’t really think Ottawa is local for Waterloo (maybe because I don’t have the Canadian perception of distance!), but definitely in-person interviews are better than phone interviews and I lucked out because it was Ignite Waterloo that night, which was awesome.

First, I had a brief chat with a recruiter, who explained that I would be using a whiteboard and the process, and then two 45 minute interviews with two software engineers, one on one. I was amazed that I found the interviews fun! Normally I find interviewing really stressful, but what’s great is that it’s not so much like interviewing as jamming with another softie. That’s pretty cool! The questions in the first interview was fairly easy, the second one was a little harder but not too bad. The hardest thing was probably coding on the whiteboard (rather than a computer!) – hard to do TDD on a whiteboard! They tell you not to get dressed up, and definitely best not to – I spent a good portion of the time sat on the floor writing on the whiteboard and covered my hands in marker. Imagine doing that in a skirt!

Helpfully, they sent me a list of things to prepare for the interview. I have a solid undergrad so I’d covered all of it at some point, but it was good to know what things to focus on revising. Note that this is in addition to what I do in general – remain current with industry news, use Google products extensively, blog, and think a lot about how technology is changing our lives (yes, these last two things helped). I also already have a good grasp and use the Java 5 additions like Generics, Enums, for-each etc.

Here’s what I prepped (all book links are Amazon links):

• Read Effective Java (2nd Edition) – I credit this book with any pretense I have of being a competent Java programmer.
• Read Programming Interviews Exposed and worked through all the exercises – really helpful overview and refreshers on basic data structures like lists and trees. The recursion section was not as strong as I’d have liked (given my functional background) and advocated writing iterative methods instead, but other than that, it was a really good and helpful book.
• Read Coders at Work – there are an astonishing number of Googlers in this book, which gives an idea of the culture. But there’s also a ton of interesting programming history that I definitely had not been aware of, insight into how these people solve problems, and discussion of APIs, scalability etc.
• Reviewed Knapsack and Traveling salesman and NP-completeness in Combinatorial Algorithms: Generation, Enumeration, and Search (I also read almost the entire book and took a course on Combinatorial Algorithms in the fall semester) – honestly, I’m not a big fan of this book. I think it’s written in a fairly math-sy way. If you’re a programmer rather than a mathematician, solving these kind of problems using actual code is probably more helpful, and Wikipedia is almost certainly more readable.
• Worked through some of Java Puzzlers – helpful for getting you in the mentality of looking at bits of code and picking out issues in it. I wasn’t asked that kind of question, but I did need to look at my own code critically. IBM gave me a question like that in my phone screen for EB, and I understand that Google do use that kind of question too.
• Reviewed concurrency issues – deadlock, livelock, mutexes, locks, semaphores etc. When would you use the synchronized keyword in Java? How do you avoid deadlock? How do you avoid livelock?
• Reviewed tree traversal – in-order, post-order, pre-order. Depth-first search vs. breadth-first search. A*, Dijkstra etc.
• Reviewed balanced binary trees – red-black trees, AVL-trees, splay-trees.
• Reviewed graphs. Representation, minimum spanning trees, search etc.
• Run-time analysis.
• Coded 6 sorting algorithms – including the key O(n log n) ones – TDD-style (Test Driven Development – see this post for my test cases).
• Coded a hash table, using only arrays. Included: generics, dynamic arrays, lazy initialization. Again, test-first.
• Worked through all the practice questions that I could get my hands on – search for “Google interview questions” but don’t bother with the estimates or manhole covers, look for ones like these. Sometimes I coded in Eclipse, but sometimes in Google docs. I’d work with a friend who would review my code and ask questions.
• Talked to my friend who worked there a lot. Asked a lot of questions. He was absolutely amazing, and really helped me a lot with my prep. Even more than that, understanding why he thinks I would be a good fit and why he believes I can do it was really helpful in understanding why I would want to work there (yes it’s a cliche, and yes it’s Google but as one of my mentors pointed out, it is about whether you want to work for them nearly as much as whether they want you).

My Googler friend says I was “insanely well prepared”, and even I would say I was adequately prepared – but having gone through it, what would I do in addition to this stuff?

• More run-time analysis – do as much of it as can find code to analyze.
• Calculating sums. E.g. how can you sum the numbers 1-n? Work through the proof. Playing back the runtime analysis from my second interview, I have something that looks like: (n-1)(n-2) + (n-2)(n-3) + … + (3)(2) + (2)(1). Of course, I didn’t create it at the time so it became an upper bound of O(n³).
• Review Java library data-structures. At one point, I was literally said, “I know there’s a data structure that doesn’t take duplicates, I just can’t remember the name of it right now”. Of course it’s anything implementing Set. And of course I remembered later than afternoon.
• Review library methods for some key things – Arrays and Strings would have been helpful.
• Practice coding on a whiteboard or just on paper. You take for granted being able to insert a line here or refactor and it’s much harder to do that on a whiteboard. Also, it’s easy to forget the return statement – Eclipse never lets me so I tend to write declarations and return statement first and put my code in the middle – can’t do that on a whiteboard!

What next?

• Waiting.
• Waiting.
• Waiting!
• Whatever happens, hopefully I will be able to get some feedback.
• Code the interview questions (with test cases!)
• Finish Java Puzzlers.
• Reclaim my life – you might have gathered, I’ve spent quite a lot of time preparing.
• Investigate opportunities with other companies. In particular – meet with IBMers and see if I can find something that’s a great fit for me there.
• Debrief with mentors.

Credit: flickr / ToniVC

My friends and some of my colleagues have been mocking me for “outsourcing my life”. I don’t think that expression is accurate though – it’s more that I’ve been outsourcing details in order to enjoy life more (and achieve more). For me, it’s all about leverage. How can I leverage myself in order to do more?

Relinquishing Control

My dad is a wonderful person and I love him so much, but he has a terrible problem delegating. He takes on too much and agrees to do things that he should have someone else take care of, and it drives my mom crazy. I worry that I have a tendency to do this too, so I’ve been forcing myself to give stuff away to other people. I tell myself that even if I don’t think they will do as good a job as I would, at least I don’t have to do it – in the worst case, I just have to fix it and that will take less time than actually doing – because starting is the thing that takes most time. But it turns out, I rarely have to fix things I delegate.

Sometimes it’s easy. If you’ve been shopping and taken advice on what to buy from your friends, a personal shopper is not a great leap (I did this when I had only a couple of days to get the right clothes to wear for my internship in the UK between 3rd and 4th year). If you do group exercise classes, a personal trainer is not so bizarre (I’ve been training with one in order to recover from my recent injuries). Outsourcing my resume was harder, but I had to acknowledge that it did not work to my strengths and so Maureen McCann of MyPromotion wrote it and she did a much better job.

Now, I’m outsourcing details. I have a PA for a couple of hours a week and she’s mostly been taking care of insurance stuff and scheduling things. It’s great, because I gave her a stack of insurance nonsense and she’s taken care of it (if I was going to, it would have happened sometime in the last 6 months that it’s been on my desk). Also, for scheduling something often I don’t really care when it is, as long as it fits within the current commitments I have. She can pick Monday at 5, and that’s fine. If I have to decide, I’ll end up agonizing about the difference between Monday at 5 and Tuesday at 5. The truth is, there probably isn’t that much of one.

Working to Your Strengths

My teammate and I were talking about being detail oriented – and I am, in terms of programming. One of my friends gave me a little trick the other day, why would you do:

if (myString.equals("something")) { myString = "something"; }

(clue, it involves immutability). I find that fascinating – I just don’t find details elsewhere that interesting. In fact, I find them draining.

Technically, my PA knows a little bit of programming (I would know, I taught her most of it). But if I have a script to write, it would be useless to delegate it to her when I can do it, and have it working in a fraction of the time it would take her to even get started. I could delegate some research stuff, but again – it would probably take her much longer. What I’m finding, though, is the things I give her to do are the things that take me a really long time and make me stressed and/or miserable, and she gets them done really quickly. This means I can get on with the tasks that give me energy, rather than drain it.

Whilst my resume was being written, I read Effective Java (Amazon). Now which is really the more productive thing to do? By doing my own resume, I save some amount of money. By reading Effective Java, I develop my expertise in my field (it is an amazing book) – to me, it’s obvious that is a better use of my time. As a bonus, I have a better resume for it.

Two weeks ago, I was in the wilderness. Last week, I gave a talk. This week, I have a terrifying job interview. All this is on top of my internship. Could I cope without a PA? Yes. But I would be more stressed out and have less time to devote to the things that matter most to me.

Putting a Value on Your Time

It seems like people sometimes think it’s arrogant to suggest that your time is worth more than someone elses. But – we all place value on our time. If you’ve ever opted to pay more for the direct flight rather than the one with multiple connections, you placed a value on time, and perhaps the stress of trying to make connections. It literally had a $ value. At work, my time is worth a fraction of that of a Distinguished Engineer. So we’re going to meet on his or her schedule, not mine. When working, we exchange time for money. So our time has a monetary value, and it varies person to person.

When I was TAing, students would sometimes send me all their code with a description of the problem that basically amounted to “it’s not working”. As a result of this, we had a chat about “iPhone optimizing” their emails. Initially, all I want is the error message. After that, I will accept the small section of code that is the problem. If we still have a problem, it’s most likely a design issue, and I expect them to come in person to see me. Yes, I can compile and run their code, but I would maintain that is not a good use of my time, and is not educational to them. By teaching them to respect my time, I’m also teaching them to debug better. And hopefully disabusing them of the notion that I’m a compiler, which, worryingly, I had to tell more than one of them.

Why is that relevant? Because all the time we make judgments as to whose time is worth more. We just express it in a different way.

Delegating Details, Not Responsibility

I’ve been embroiled in a disagreement with Goodlife, because I want to work out with a trainer once a week just to make sure that I’m realigning myself (I dislocated my right knee, right shoulder, twisted my right ankle, and messed up my right hip – bit of a disaster zone) and I don’t want to commit to 9 months of 3 times a week, which seems to be their (utterly ridiculous) minimum. So I negotiated, or rather, I convinced my trainer who then negotiated with her manager. And then they backed down a little, to 2x a week for 6 months and they would sell any that I had over. I explained that I would be gone for about 2 months out of the next 6 and countered with 2x a week for 4 months and this was refused because they “couldn’t guarantee results” with that many sessions.

This really frustrated me, because I don’t want to delegate the responsibility for me to get back into shape after this many injuries. I just want to delegate the details of what exactly I should be doing to rehabilitate. I also see PT as a complement to the other exercise I do (kickboxing, swimming, rollerblading, body pump, yoga, cardio…) rather as the exercise I do.

Likewise with my PA, I don’t tell her “plan my life after graduation and decide where I should apply for jobs”, I give her concrete tasks like, “please deal with this pile of insurance stuff as per this form”, and “I have to be in location X for an interview on date Y at Z time for a duration of i minutes – please work out how and when I’m going to get there and where I’m going to stay”.

Things We Don’t Do

In North America, it’s normal to have an automatic car. This makes sense to me, because the car does a better job of changing gear than most people do. For the most part, we don’t cut our own hair (if we have any sense – this applies to dramatic eyebrow reshaping too), grow our own food, or produce our own electricity. It’s not productive to implement our own source control systems, or test runners. We don’t create our own crawl of the web, we Google.

Obviously this can go to far, if we say “I don’t need to know how to entertain myself, I have a TV for that”. But one crucial thing that I get from other people is confidence – I get driven forwards because other people believe in me, even when I doubt myself.

As part of this minimalism malarkey that I’m not such an aficionado of, I’ve read a number of times “Don’t outsource – if you don’t want to do something, just stop doing it”. I don’t really understand how that works, I mean what if you don’t want to do your taxes? Will that hold with the IRS?

Delegating does force me to evaluate things though. If I don’t want to give up responsibility, then I actually need to get it done. If I’m going to pay someone else to do it, it should be something that it’s really worth doing.

It also helps me with saying no, which I’m not great at doing. Someone asked me to do something the other day that I really wanted to say yes to but would have been really difficult and caused a lot of stress. Rather than saying yes and trying to make it work logistically, I just delegated it. But if someone’s asking me to do something and I’m literally going to pay someone else to do it so I don’t have to, it had better be a reasonable and worthwhile request that I really want to accommodate.

It’s not Minimizing “Work”, it’s about Maximizing “Great”

I read the book The 4-Hour Workweek (Amazon) and it is a really interesting book that helped me evaluate where I’m spending my time, but I agree with Penelope Trunk – the thrust is not about just “working” 4 hours a week, it’s about making the vast majority of what you do not feel like work (she represented that a little more negatively).

Another book I read recently is Do More Great Work (Amazon). I was working through the exercises in it, and it was great because I realized that Extreme Blue is all about Great Work.

The thing about Great Work is that it’s easy to get caught up in Good Work and not get to it. So delegating good work helps me move forward with great work. Managing my email might be good work, but it’s time consuming and rarely as rewarding or useful as a blog post or a piece of code.

Really, what it comes down to is that there are only a finite number of hours in a day. Delegating is buying a little more time and energy to make a little more progress on the things that matter most to you.

Credit: flickr / h.koppdelaney

The best way for me to remember and understand them is to code them, and I decided to go through the list on Wikipedia and code them in Java – even the recursive ones. I think recursively much better in Haskell but interviewers aren’t always cool when you ask to solve the problem in a non-standard language (I lucked out last time).

Because I was writing a lot of similar code, I created an interface first, so that I could write parametrized test cases. These methods should really be static, but I compromised on that in order to make my testing easier.

 public interface Sort {
     public abstract void sort(int[] array);
 }

This was pretty easy, and allowed me to write a parametrized test case that would run all my tests on anything implementing Sort. So I had some code that looked like this:

 private Sort sort;

 public TestSort(Sort sort) {
     this.sort = sort;
 }

 @Parameters
 public static Collection regExValues() {
     return Arrays.asList(new Object[][] {
         { new BubbleSort() },
         { new InsertionSort() },
         { new ShellSort() },
         { new MergeSort() },
         { new QuickSort() },
         { new CountingSort() } });
 }

And as I created each new class I just added it to my list of parameters, and all my tests (labeled @Test) would be run on them as well. My tests were pretty repetitive and probably could have been parametrized as well, but because I was testing all these different classes I opted for slightly more code in the tests. (Full test code below)

This approach really reduced my coding time, because once I’d set up the interface and the tests I could get a new class working very easily without using cut and paste. I also determined what I wanted to test: null, empty, one element, two elements sorted, two elements unsorted, odd number of elements, even number of elements, and longer with duplicates. When I added an extra test case part way through, it applied to all my previous classes. Determining the tests in advance was more effective than ad-hoc testing, for example, the odd number of elements test was helpful in catching an off-by-one bug.

It also encouraged me to write better code. I might write the function, understand it, and just have a little bug – but I’d keep at it, because I wanted all the tests to pass before I moved on. I also had one bug that was resulting in an array with just two elements reversed – I didn’t notice that staring at the debug statement, it looked fine. But of course, my tests noticed! And the time when I wrote the algorithm right first time? That was pretty nice! Even if it was the super easy CountingSort.

Credit: flickr / David Singleton

Full test code is below if you have any use for it! Note – parameterized test cases are JUnit 4, and I’ve just used ints rather than a Generic <extends Comparable> approach – if you decide to do that, just change to Integer or anything else that implements Comparable.

import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.Collection;

import org.junit.Assert;
import org.junit.Test;
import org.junit.runner.RunWith;
import org.junit.runners.Parameterized;
import org.junit.runners.Parameterized.Parameters;

@RunWith(Parameterized.class)
public class TestSort {

	private Sort sort;

	public TestSort(Sort sort) {
		this.sort = sort;
	}

	@Parameters
	public static Collection regExValues() {
		return Arrays.asList(new Object[][] {
				{new BubbleSort()},
				{new InsertionSort()},
				{new ShellSort()},
				{new MergeSort()},
				{new QuickSort()},
				{new CountingSort()}});
	}

	// null array
	@Test(expected=IllegalArgumentException.class)
	public void testNullArray() {
		sort.sort(null);
	}

	// empty array
	@Test
	public void testEmptyArray() {
		int[] array = new int[0];
		sort.sort(array);
		Assert.assertArrayEquals(new int[0], array);
	}

	// one element array
	@Test
	public void testOneElementArray() {
		int[] array = {42};
		int[] test = {42};
		sort.sort(array);
		Assert.assertArrayEquals(test, array);
	}

	// two element array ordered
	@Test
	public void testTwoElementOrdArray() {
		int[] array = {7, 42};
		int[] test = {7, 42};
		sort.sort(array);
		Assert.assertArrayEquals(test, array);
	}

	// two element array unordered
	@Test
	public void testTwoElementUnordArray() {
		int[] array = {42, 7};
		int[] test = {7, 42};
		sort.sort(array);
		Assert.assertArrayEquals(test, array);
	}

	// odd numbered element array
	@Test
	public void testOddNoElementsArray() {
		int[] array = {42, 68, 9, 7, 100, 36, 27};
		int[] test = {7, 9, 27, 36, 42, 68, 100};
		sort.sort(array);
		Assert.assertArrayEquals(test, array);
	}

	// even numbered element array
	@Test
	public void testEvenNoElementsArray() {
		int[] array = {42, 68, 9, 7, 100, 36, 27, 99};
		int[] test = {7, 9, 27, 36, 42, 68, 99, 100};
		sort.sort(array);
		Assert.assertArrayEquals(test, array);
	}

	// array in reverse order
	@Test
	public void testReverseOrder() {
		int[] array = {100, 99, 68, 42, 36, 27, 9, 7};
		int[] test = {7, 9, 27, 36, 42, 68, 99, 100};
		sort.sort(array);
		Assert.assertArrayEquals(test, array);
	}

	// longer array
	@Test
	public void testLongerArray() {
		int[] array = {13, 14, 94, 33, 82, 25, 59, 94, 65, 23, 45, 27, 73, 25, 39, 10};
		int[] test = {10, 13, 14, 23, 25, 25, 27, 33, 39, 45, 59, 65, 73, 82, 94, 94};
		sort.sort(array);
		Assert.assertArrayEquals(test, array);
	}
}

Credit: flickr / Seattle Miles

The other day I was having lunch with some other interns, and they were discussing their GPA. It made me question what I was doing, surrounded by 20-22 year-olds who think that a GPA is a measure of achievement and/or a defining characteristic. I mean, to participate in the conversation should I calculate my GPA? I don’t even know how. Should I point out that nonsense courses to lift your GPA don’t actually make you a better programmer? Should I keep my mouth shut and edge away, because afterall I don’t fully understand the Canadian undergraduate system… except this focus I see on grades over substance makes me extremely grateful that I got my undergrad from Edinburgh.

Being at intern at 25 is… weird. Yes, it’s an amazing opportunity. Yes, we have great training. But I can’t shake the feeling that I should be doing more than being an intern at this stage in my life.

My friend Maggie (another intern) is planning her next steps at the moment. She’s incredibly together and only 20 – she makes me feel 1) old and 2) clueless. She was telling me recently, that she’s figured out that before she can work out what she wants to do and where she wants to go, she needs to figure out her priorities.

This made me realize – I’ve been picking themes by which I prioritize my choices. When I left Edinburgh to be a nomad, I prioritized an interesting life and being interesting myself (Penelope Trunk on an interesting vs a happy life). Arriving in Ottawa, I was lost, but my theme evolved to making change, or being the change I want to see – though taking a different approach to programming curricula and the talks I give, through WISE, and through the Awesome Foundation. Even working on defining influence – influence can be seen as the ability to make change.

So for my next step – what’s my theme going to be? I want it to be about how programmers can change the world; through better software, facilitating remote working, enabling connections across geographical barriers and – crucial in this age of information overload – helping people better manage the information they have available to them. What does this mean? A programming job. Finding an open source project to contribute to.

Where can I do this? IBM is a great place to work on all of this, as is the company where I’ll interview next week. And now I’ve identified my theme, I can look out for other places where I could chase this next dream.

How about you – what’s your priority for your next step?

Credit: flickr / khoraxis

Credit: flickr / -Snugg-

Ages and ages ago, I wrote about not having imposter syndrom anymore. I wrote about how being a programmer was an accident, but a happy one. I give talks (one next week in fact) on how great it is to code.

But this evening, I was trying to prep for this interview I have coming up next month, and I sucked at a question about binary search trees and… I cried.

I totally cried. And, in fact, had a complete meltdown over my poor friend Dig. And contemplated canceling the interview and just not going for it. Because I felt so completely inadequate.

I don’t feel inadequate at grad school. From time to time in Extreme Blue, but mostly not. But this interview is freaking me out. It’s really intimidating me. The company, the fact it’s a 2-hour technical interview that getting through means going back again for an even longer second round.

How could I not freak out?

Tomorrow morning I’m headed to the wilderness. The other day I wrote about needing to leave my comfort zone more – well I’m definitely doing that.

Here’s the thing – I love to code, but mostly so it enables me to create. I understand how to optimize, but don’t do it for the sake of it. I know the different data-structures, but see them as building blocks, not the be-all and end-all. One of my friends found me, mid-meltdown, and said that I might be a better programmer as a result of this attitude.

Sure, maybe, but this interview is geared towards people who like to take things apart. I’m a person who likes to put things together. That’s the kind of person I write for – my blog, and the curricula I create.

I don’t know how to be someone who takes things apart.