The other day I had an interesting job interview. The interviewer ask me deep questions, but as I felt quite nervous due the pressure to get the job, my answers were terrible.
So, from the comfort of my chair and with all the time of the world to think about that questions, I will try to respond better this time.
What was your biggest challenge?
We can divide this question in two areas. One non-technical, and the other one technical.
My biggest non-technical challenge was when I worked as freelance. I dove into the world of freelancing thinking that was something easy, and I never could be more wrong.
I was a one-man orchesta, seeking for new clients, creating contracts, doing designs, making specifications, coding, finding bugs, solving them, making deploys, going to meetings, asking for payments, etc. I survived one year and half to that, and finally I have to quit when I started to go to the university.
My biggest technical challenge, as far I can remember, was when I created a web application for a marketing company, from the design to the code.
The application had to be completely personalizable, and had a lot of sections, so the database grow to has more than 30 tables (most of it related), and some queries took 5 seconds to complete. So I melted my brain trying to make things better and at that time I meet the pain of working with complex databases.
What have you contributed to your team?
The best thing that I think I did, and I didn’t see in previous projects of the team, it’s high quality HTML/CSS layouts. That means that I’m careful on all the aspects of the layout (the minimum resolution to support, how it will look in super large screens, how It looks in most browsers, etc). Also, I try to use all the power of HTML + CSS. That means that I feel a bad person if I have to adjust things via scripts, even when I know that our web applications must have JS to run.
However, I prefer to use JS for the functionality, and HTML/CSS to render the application. At this time, in most cases I accomplish that, with some exception of the infamous Internet Explorer.
What are your favorite languages?
My current favorite language is JavaScript. I know that is not very suitable for back-end purposes (I work in a project that uses Node and didn’t get excellent results, but it’s acceptable), but as language as itself, and to work in the front-end, JavaScript it’s great.
What are you weakness?
I’m too responsible and perfectionist. Just kidding, thanks God I don’t have that terrible problems.
I don’t know all my weakness, but the current ones what I’m working on are about work estimation and status report.
I’m always sucked at doing estimations, and the best approach that I found to solve that it’s using ideal time estimation.
Ideal time is, take the time in my head, and then multiply by a factor like 3. So if in my head I think that a task will take me 6 hours or 1 day, the real time would be 18 hours or 3 days. But sometimes I have to do fast estimations, and several times I have problems with that.
And it won’t be so terrible if I told others that I’m stuck with a task. As a programmer, I love challenges, so when I get stuck, I’m get hypnotized by the problem and forgot about everything.
So I’m currently working to do better estimations, talk to others as soon as possible as I know that I can’t reach the task in the agreed time, and ask for help when I need it.
