The previous chapters gave you a lot of information about how to prepare for software development interviews, how to research potential employers, and how to ask the right question during the interview. However, for many of you, that may not quite be enough to get the level of confidence that you need to feel comfortable. In this chapter, I want to talk about some resources that I’ve found that are very helpful for getting through both the whiteboard interview and interviews in general. Some of these resources also have quite a bit to offer an aspiring developer, even after they’ve gotten their first job. This is nowhere near an exhaustive list, as there are hundreds of web sites, podcasts, blogs, and YouTube channels that are designed specifically to help developers get started on their careers. However, these are enough to get started.
Podcasts
I would be remiss in failing to mention my own podcast, especially the early episodes, as a resource that you’ll find useful on your journey into software development. Myself and BJ Burns (who was my apprentice during the early days of the podcast) started this before he got his first “real” programming job. Each week, we talk through a topic around software development, covering everything from interviewing to soft skills, to security, to algorithms. The goal of this podcast is to help create better developers by having a more junior developer and a more seasoned developer discuss a topic and try to explain it in actual English (versus the overly technical descriptions you get from tech books). As of the writing of this book, we’ve been going strong for over 3 years. You can find us at www.CompleteDeveloperPodcast.com .
Another podcast I would suggest is “Junior Developer Toolbox.” Currently featuring my friends Dave and Erin, the Junior Developer Toolbox is a podcast about building, maintaining, and surviving a career in software engineering. It’s about real-life junior developer work in the trenches of software development. You can start checking this out at www.JuniorDeveloperToolbox.com .
Meetups
My friend BJ and I also have a meetup group in Nashville called Developer Launchpad. At this monthly meetup, developers working with a variety of languages and platforms work through practice problems. We have a problem of the month that we put on the Developer Launchpad web site, which is the recommended problem for the meetup. The monthly problem has three levels of difficulty, depending on the skills of the attendee. We also practice working through whiteboard problems if anyone needs to do so. Previous months’ problems can be found at www.DeveloperLaunchpad.com . Previous months’ exercises are still useful for code katas.
Practice Questions
If you are nervous about whiteboard interviews, you probably are also a bit nervous about the general process of the software development interview. If that’s the case, I’d also recommend checking out Cracking the Coding Interview, 5th ed. by Gayle Laakmann McDowell.1 This book goes through a large number of developer interview questions and walks you through the process of solving these problems. If you are doing the code katas as recommended in this book, there are plenty of good options there to use as practice material.
Continuing Education
Once your job search is successful, you’ll get a job. While at the moment that may look like the goal of your journey, it’s actually just the beginning. If you truly want to be the best you can be, simply being employed is not going to be enough. To be your best, you have to continually be improving yourself. The team at Simple Programmer has created a lot of training material for those seeking to have better, happier careers, along with better, more balanced lives. While there is paid stuff here, a lot of the free material is very useful for preparing for an interview and dealing with very specific problems you might encounter in your career.
Not only have John Sonmez and Josh Earl put together a tremendous amount of material in the development space, but they’ve also helped many other aspiring authors to build their own careers (including myself). The first code I was paid for writing was nearly 20 years ago, and I still get useful, actionable information from the various Simple Programmer channels. The Simple Programmer team not only produces things to help developers be awesome, but they also enable those developers to grow into good mentors for other developers. If putting virality into awesome sounds like your jam, you should start checking them out at www.SimpleProgrammer.com .
I would also highly recommend both of John’s books: The Complete Software Developer’s Career Guide2 and Soft Skills : The Software Developer’s Life Manual.3 Frankly, both of these books should be issued to new developers when they get their first work computer.
Interview Cake
The next logical step after working your way through this book is Interview Cake. The premise of Interview Cake is that the programming interview is a winnable game, and it is one that they teach you how to play well. There is more to an interview than just the whiteboard interview, and Interview Cake teaches you how to get through it.
While this book has been about how to get through the mechanics of the whiteboard interview and how to prepare for the process, Interview Cake actually walks you through a more extensive set of development problems. Not only do they offer programming interview questions by language, but they offer them by company (such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook). If you are planning on getting an interview with any of the companies that are leaders in this industry, Interview Cake can take you from merely ready to crushing the interview. You can take the next step at www.InterviewCake.com .
CodeNewbie
CodeNewbie.org
CodeNewbie.org/podcast
CodeKata.com
CodeKata is an excellent web site with loads of practice problems that are perfect for using in code katas (hence the name). If you practice these regularly, you will do better on real development tests. These problems even include things you won’t run into during a typical code camp, so they can also be helpful for closing the knowledge gap between yourself and someone with a computing-related degree. Check them out at www.CodeKata.com .
Project Euler
If you are looking for more difficult practice problems, you should check out Project Euler ( https://projecteuler.net/ ). This web site has some programming problems that are a bit more difficult and require a lot more math. If you are interviewing for jobs that are a little math heavy, then this web site will give you a lot of problems to work with.
Companies That Don’t Do Whiteboards
Look, I get it. Whiteboard interviews are annoying enough to deal with that you may want to avoid them entirely. If that sounds like something useful to you, be sure and check out a curated list of companies that don’t do whiteboard interviews. There are hundreds of options and at least some of them are bound to sound interesting to you. Check it out at https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards .
If you do go this route, a lot of the material in this book will still be useful to you. At the very least, keep up with your practice with code katas and the like. The lack of whiteboard interviews doesn’t necessarily mean that things will be easier—it just means that they are doing something else.