Top 3: how to find great developers, new command line tools and lessons from the CEO of Pebble (smart watch)

Hello my friends. Lost access to my ConvertKit account last week, hope you're doing well ❤️

Here's what I picked this week, enjoy!

1. How to Freaking Find Great Developers By Having Them Read Code 🔥

TL;DR: How to find great developers.

How the typical process looks nowadays:

• "write a function that does X"
• "and what is O big?"
• "let's improve it to O (log n)"

The problem with this approach is that candidates who have solved a bunch of similar problems and memorized the solution are more likely to pass such interviews.

Are we testing their skill or their ability to memorize answers?

Other candidates who haven't solved such problems will, at best, solve them in the most suboptimal way. And when they are asked to optimize the solution to O (log n), they are unlikely to be able to.

Usually such problems require some kind of deep insight to come up with the O (log n) solution. True insight almost never comes to even the smartest candidates in the timeframe of an interview.

Better way:

Instead of solving abstract problems, ask the candidate to read existing code and talk about what it does and how it works.

Why it’s more effective:

• Reading probes the most fundamental skills. Reading code is probably 95% of what a developer does as part of their job. Whether a developer is writing new code, fixing bugs, or creating documentation, they are constantly reading.
• By explaining what’s written, you can immediately see how the candidate thinks, their technical skills, their knowledge of the technology and their ability to explain clearly.
• Reading is less stressful than writing, which means the "thinking process" will be closer to the real job (stress reduces cognitive ability)

I think this approach is as good as solving a real problem (like writing a simple chat with a ready-made backend, which usually takes about an hour).

Less stress for the candidate + faster reading than writing = more problems to solve and more skills to test = better understanding whether or not you have a great developer in front of you.

2. A list of new(ish) command line tools​

TL;DR: A list of modern commands for the command line.

This is how a modern replacement looks like:

• ls → exa​
• grep → ripgrep​
• find → fd​

Here is another list with alternatives to common unix commands: youk.

3. Success and Failure at Pebble​

TL;DR: The story of the successes and failures of the Pebble (smart watch) from the company's former CEO.

“The underlying problem was that we shifted from making something we knew people wanted, to making an ill-defined product that we hoped people wanted.”

I often made this problem myself until I was told to read The Mom Test.

That's all for this week, take care and have a great one!

– Nick

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