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Interviews: Sodahead and Disney

How exciting, I got a 1pm meeting today with Sodahead. I blew my chance to hook up with VC funded start up three years ago. I just didn’t know enough about MVC, and ORM, and Agile Development. The same problem occurred at Disney and Varient.

Varient didn’t like me because I had never seen ->assign(‘name’,$value) statements before. And I totally flunked one of their questions, “Create a left hand menu with 3 random links selected from a database”. I was so amped the night before, and crashing so hard that day, I went into my own world of .. use rnd() and use a loop to get 3 unique id numbers. when the answer was “select * from links order by rand limit 3”.

Sodahead didn’t like me because I didn’t know about Agile Development, or Scrum, and I had no clue what ORM, or object relational mapping is. What was I supposed to say? I mean, we didn’t have main stream frameworks at Bill McCaffrey’s setup, and their servers were getting 2 billion page view’s a month. Bill taught me that the best most efficient way to extend PHP is with C. He also taught me, screw oracle, write your own middleware, in C.

I hope to have changed this precedent, and today I will find out, as I walk into a Django backend and YUI frontend shop, Sodahead.com
And then do a phone screening with Disney.

Manifesto for Agile Software Development

We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.