Pervasive Code

Interviewing at large tech companies is different from interviewing at a startup. Here are some tips about how the interview process differs, and some specific advice for how you can prepare.
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If you make a screen with a name using screen -S foo and then try and reattach later using screen -R f<tab> it doesn’t work. It only completes the full name as seen in screen -ls which starts with the PID of the detached screen, like 9972.foo. Not very convenient. Why can’t it just complete using the name you gave it?

Someone else solved this problem three years ago but nobody accepted their patch, and now /etc/bash_completion.d/screen has been overhauled and the patch no longer applies.

I updated the patch so it works and resubmitted it to Ubuntu.

If you don’t wanna wait, grab the code from this gist and do this:

sudo patch /etc/bash_completion.d/screen screen.patch

This will probably work on Debian too since that’s where the completion script came from.

In the past few weeks, I’ve had a few conversations with web developers and back-end engineers who are unfamiliar with Ruby, in which I’ve tried to explain how Ruby can be nearly as expressive as Perl (tiny amounts of code can accomplish a lot) while being as readable as Python or Java. In fact, I think that Ruby’s expressiveness can remove distracting boilerplate code, allowing compact expressions to be far more readable than a more verbosely written version of the same algorithm.
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I started playing with MacRuby this evening. macirb wouldn’t run with my customized .irbrc and gave the following error:

/usr/local/bin/macirb:60:in `block': No such file or directory - open() failed (Errno::ENOENT)
	from /usr/local/bin/macirb:9:in `block'
	from /usr/local/bin/macirb:7:in `
'

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SSH port forwarding is so useful that sometimes you want to daemonize it, to create encrypted tunnels that never go away. But it’s not trivial to do this. Fortunately it is possible with a little fiddling, and I did it using monit.
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