I’m writing this on my Lenovo ThinkPad. But at the same time, I know the design is heavily influenced by Apple’s work in the portable computer space. Thanks, Steve.

It was interesting seeing the fair. I have a few observations. A lot of people–I dare say most people– wore suits. I firmly believe that is utterly out of place at an engineering fair, unless you only want to talk to Goldman Sachs. A lot of people wearing suits were wearing them wrong too–poorly matched ties, ill fitting shirts, etc…. At a lot of these startups it says you completely misunderstand their culture. In fact, my suspicion was validated by Pivotal Labs who went out of their way to thank me for dressing down. I went with denim and oxford with rolled sleeves. That might not be ideal, but I hope it exudes that casual/serious feel that I think companies are looking for in engineers.

The other thing I tried that I think worked well was not “resume pushing.” A lot of employers aren’t trying to kill trees these days and want to learn about the candidate and get the info online, not necessarily get a huge stack of paper CVs. This allowed me to get to know the person, the company, and their desires before they needed a resume.

Finally, I tried to keep my resume in the 21st century by featuring my Twitter, GitHub, and LinkedIn usernames. Google and Dropbox both commented on it and thought it was really unique and cool that I did that. The days of the standard serif-font one-size-fits all resume are over.

Here’s how to determine if a number is a power of two:

Of course, this sets 0 to be a power of two as well. I found this site which recommends using this instead which fixes this.

I’m currently taking AI, which I think will be good to brush up on my algorithms and searching, and I never had that in undergrad. I’m also in an Info Retrieval course which is doing some interesting stuff with text searching and MapReduce. Software Engineering is primarily about project management tasks, but involves building a substantial project. Finally, I’m taking statistics because I’m trying to keep my math sharp mostly, and there weren’t any other CS courses that fit well into my strategy and schedule.

It’s about the money, but not in the way you think
Engineers don’t care about maxing the dollars. They care about experience, cool problems, and great teams. None of that is in your job description. In my last job I turned down 5k/year more for a better experience, and it actually really paid off because I enjoyed what I did. Engineers do care, however, about value. I know you get kickbacks from the corporations, and when you quote me 40% less than what I know I’m worth, it tells me you think I’m as taken as the community college intern. Smart engineers can do math. Compensation should reflect value.

It’s about the company, but not in the way you think
If I’m interviewing at the Facebooks, the Googles, the Amazons, and Microsofts, I’d like to know what the company with this mysterious “great opportunity” does. The vague “Fortune 500” company description is no good. I’m going to look up reviews and consult other developers about company culture before I even want to talk. At the end of the day it’s not about market cap and the downtown skyscraper, because there’s a great chance a fledgling startup has a better culture and better products.