Posts

Aug 14, 2014 Introducing Test Driven Development to a Team
Personally, I love the concept of Test Driven Development/Design. I firmly believe that this development practice produces clean, testable, and maintainable software. I’ve worked in a few US Government contracts, and I must say that the practice is not very common in these environments. In the contracts that I’ve worked in, I’m usually the person pioneering this practice and I’ve found that spreading it to the rest of the team can many times be difficult.
Jun 25, 2014 Fizzbuzz and the Interview
Technical interviews are hard to do, or at least, they’re hard for me. It’s hard to judge a candidate’s skills in a 30 minute or 1 hour timeframe. And from this period of time, you’re expected to make a decision on the skill levels of a candidate. Some candidates don’t interview well even if they have the skill sets you require. On the other side of the coin, there are candidates who interview well but don’t deliver on their tasks later on. In order to get the best and brightest candidates for a project, several companies have come up with various methods to screen candidates. Companies have used to have out-of-the-box style questions (How many golfballs fit in a 747?), others have long hours of back-to-back interviews, others endlessly quizz on obscure language constructs (How would you swap the values of 2 variables without using a third temporary one?). There are many techniques to use, but to me a technical interview will always start with FizzBuzz. I tend to use the standard FizzBuzz problem:
Jun 11, 2014 On Resumés
I don’t like resumés. I find them difficult to write, difficult to read, and many times resumés provide little value without an interview. Many resumés are cluttered with an alphabet soup of technologies, operating systems, concepts, tools, etc. I know candidates do this to make pass the automated resumé scanning tools and make it to recruiters’ “short piles”. However, I don’t really care if a Java developer has used Microsoft Word or has experience using Ubuntu Linux, these are skills that a) should not be very difficult to acquire, and b) it can be assumed that they are fairly common for a developer.
Jun 5, 2014 Hello World
I am Jaime Garcia. I live in Virginia with my wife and two cats. I started my development career with a TI-83 calculator in the eight grade, in order to make Algebra a little easier. After that I moved on to Turbo Pascal and C++ in High School. It was then that I knew that a career in software development was right for me. Currently, I’m mostly a Java developer working on web applications for the US Federal Government. During my free time, I try to keep up with our ever changing world of languages, frameworks, and tools.