A conversation I had with the co-founder and CTO of a tech startup at Factory Berlin recently prompted me to write about my approach to interviewing technical candidates and also on how I approach these types of interviews myself. The TL;DR is this:
‘How to avoid tech interviews as we know them’
Tech Interviewing Is Broken
Many articles have been written about why the technical interview process is fundamentally broken (because it’s exclusive, elitist, dehumanizing, etc…) and, based my own experience, I would agree. For example, the dreaded whiteboard coding algorithm test interviews, in particular, have screened out many a qualified candidate — including…
CODEX
Stop installing stuff on your laptop!
I work with a plethora of languages, clouds and tools. To that end I find myself setting up dev environments frequently. In this article, I’ll share patterns for efficiency in the process.
1. Cloud-based Laptops
Long ago I stopped installing random stuff on my personal laptop. Rather, I have been using one or more cloud-based services as developer environments for quite awhile now. To that end, it seemed odd when a recent client actually sent me a physical laptop, rather than using a cloud-based environment so that I could get my work done for them.
Reflecting and looking forward after a year of daily GitHub contributions
Learning as a Serial Monogamist
I tend to do each new-to-me thing for about a year at a time. Lifelong learning is my way. Fun fact: I’ve never owned a TV.
For example, there was the year, when I did all of the then-available Khan Academy Math (~500 lessons). I ‘did math’ every day for a few hours for that entire year. I learned calculus at age 51 — so much joy.
Then there was the year when I delivered technical keynote talks all over the world — in London, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney…
Creating a new home in the Midwest
1 year ago today I eagerly opened the door to my new home in Minneapolis. After having driven across the Western US to get here, I arrived with all of my possessions — two suitcases filled with clothes.
The drive back to my native Midwest from Southern California was leisurely and still familiar. 23 years before I made the same drive — in the opposite direction. It was time now for my next chapter.
In these 12 months since I got to Minneapolis, I slowly turned my empty apartment into a new home…
“Well, that’s different”
As we say here in the Midwest, 2020 is ‘different’ when it comes to travel for most all of us. While it is true that I proclaimed in 2019 that is was finally time for me to ‘slow down travel’, I never imagined to what extent this would happen. In January as what would be the pandemic emerged, I wrote a short piece acknowledging what I assumed would be my (lack of) travel in 2020. Here we are 8 months later and how is it going?
2020 is the first year since 2007 that I will have…
Australian summer, Feb 2017, I took a break from coding and walked around Sydney harbor. Despite the stunning beauty, I felt an unnatural, desert-like, searing heat in the air. And every year it is getting hotter there. In 2019, Sydney set a record of 107 degrees.
That same year there were devastating fires in many parts of Oz. In my global travel, I’ve seen too much of what is happening to our planet due to climate change. The record heat events in Australia are but one of most striking effects I’ve personally experienced. …
by Lynn Langit and Kelly Kermode
When building data analysis pipelines for genomic-scale workloads, the typical approach is to use a Data Lake Architecture. In this article, we’ll detail using this architecture on Azure. The general Data Lake pattern (shown below) includes several surface areas and uses common cloud services. Of note are the three major surface areas — Blob Storage for files (data layer), Batch Compute for Virtual Machine clusters (compute layer), and Interactive Analysis for query-on-files (analysis layers).
Files are the Data
In the Data Lake pattern, data, which is usually in the form of various types of files, is stored in…
from a Microsoft RD, Google GDE & AWS Community Hero
As an independent Cloud Architect and Developer, I am often asked whether I work for Amazon, Google or Microsoft. The short answer is NO. However I am part of technical award membership programs at all three. This post details my path to these cloud partnerships.
Cloud Partnerships are awards — not employment.
Although I’ve developed close working relationships with all three companies, in actuality I work for each of my customers. Yet the practicality is that I use cloud services developed by these public cloud vendors to meet my customer’s…
What kind of Karen am I?
I am a middle-aged, blonde — thinking I can still be fit, driving a close-to-new SUV.
I live in Minneapolis…but not in the suburbs.
I grew up in a small town in North Dakota and dreamed of living in a big city. I took a couple of detours (for ~40 years!) before I finally got back to the Midwest, last year in September.
It’s been wonderful…and terrible.
The Cities
People in this area simply say ‘The Cities’ meaning Minneapolis and St. Paul.
My parents don’t have passports and rarely flew in airplanes — even across the US. We took a couple of…
Working with a team from the Imperial College in London, we started by reviewing a genomic analysis workflow which is currently running on their HPC cluster. The workflow is a complete analysis for single-cell/nuclei RNA-sequencing data. I started by reviewing the workflow process steps generated by the Nextflow script used to run it.
Next I reviewed the current method of running this workflow by connecting with the team and observing them run this analysis on their HPC cluster. Of note is that the workflow utilizes containerization via Singularity / Docker.
Lynn Langit
Cloud Architect who codes
