10 questions to make on a tech interview

In a job interview the employer aims to get to know the candidate and assess his fit for the position. Your goal would be to show that you're the person that they're looking for, by getting key insights about the company, and exposing how your abilities and strengths play into them. Here are 10 questions to guide you on the process, focused on tech companies, and specially startups.

Tech:

1. What is the company's tech stack? APIs, databases, programming languages, frameworks, servers, third party services like Intercom or New Relic. You can use this question to expand on your working experience by talking about similar stacks you've worked it in other companies or personal projects.

Ignore a file globally in git

Set up a global .gitignore:
git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global
Put the file name in the global gitignore file:
echo ".DS_Store" >> ~/.gitignore_global
Done!

11 Google Chrome Extensions

Continuing the post about my Mac OS X setup, here are the Chrome extensions I currently use. As you might notice, there's a heavy focus in web development, since that's what I do on my day job; and in keyboard-driven interfaces, which you can read more about here. Off we go!

General Tools

• Authy: 2-Factor Authentication with support for countless apps. I use it for my Google, Amazon, and Heroku accounts, for starters.
• Crystal: "Communicate with anyone, based on personality". Try it out, it's uncanny.
• Google Translate: For the pages that Chrome doesn't recognize as translatable. Offers One-click full page translations, or single word lookup in hundreds of languages.

Setting up Atom for Web Development

In the vein of these Sublime Text 3 recommendations for Rails development, here's my Atom setup for developing web apps.

After using Sublime and Vim for several years, I switched to Atom a year ago, and have not missed one feature from the other two so far. Since Atom is in continuous development by the core team and the community, it only gets better as time passes. Also, it's free.

First, an FAQ/C:

• Why can't it open >2MB files like ST does?>2MB file support is tracked for the 1.0 release out already!
• The startup time too slow!
  There's continuing work on this, getting better on every release.

Packages

No need to install any package manager for Atom. The editor is composed of over 50 open-source packages, and so the package manager is built in. There's a phenomenal package repository online, or you can search for them directly on Atom's Settings -> Install. And, since Atom is open source and built using web technologies, creating new packages or extending exiting ones is easy. Here are the ones I use:

Export a list from Wunderlist

No amount of googling has provided me with a way to export a list from Wunderlist. The closest I've found form an official answer is "this is something we hope to add with a future update". Here's my unofficial solution:

• Navigate to the list you want to export:
  
• Open the Chrome console: Ctrl + Shift + J / Cmd + Opt + J
• Load jQuery by pasting the following:

  var jq = document.createElement('script');
  jq.src = "https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js";
  document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(jq);
  

• Paste this to print out your list on the console

$('.taskItem-titleWrapper-title').map(function(){ return $(this).text();})


• Grab your shiny new list from the console in a convenient format :D

If you've found a better solution, do share!

I got a Game Boy!

Remember how I wanted to get a Game Boy a couple weeks ago? Well here it is!

• Game boy Advance SP: 15€
• Metroid II: 15€

Also, I just found a way to change the color of original Game Boy games on the Game Boy advance: input one of the following combinations when the Game Boy logo appears:

This way I can play Metroid II in black and white, for maximum nostalgia :)

My experience with the "No Poo" Method

During the past two months I have been trying the No Poo method:

"Just because something is modern, doesn't mean it's the best option. Up until the late 1800s, people were recommended to wash their hair once a month. Decades later, the first synthetic shampoo was developed and that frequency increased to every two weeks, with daily shampooing becoming the norm by the 1970s. Shampoos on the market today might be gentler than past formulas, but they can still wreak havoc on your quest for a sexy mane. An underground movement has begun: the “No Poo Method” for shampoo free healthy hair."

I have greasy hair, so being more than 24 hours without washing it means a greasy mess on my head. I started weaning of shampoo one day by simply not using it on my daily shower, and kept going for a month and a half. The worst part was the first two weeks:

Install Ruby on Rails in Windows —and Postgres, and Mongo, and Redis...

Googling "setting up rails on Windows", this is the second result, by @erikjansson

After spilling half a glass of water on my work Macbook Air, I set out to setup Rails on my PC once and for all. Having tried solutions like Nitrous.io to varying levels of success, I decided that noting would cut it like the real deal.