Happy New Year! Another year in review
Kiran Koduru • Jan 29, 2018 • 2 minutes to read
Happy new year everyone! How was 2017? I myself had a heck of a time. I wanted to share some lessons and experiences I learned during the year.
Interviews and new jobs
Last year has been all about interviewing for a new job. I was on the job market not once, but twice. I had over 20 conversations during my interviewing phase. The format of the interviews were usually an introductory phone call, followed by a technical phone interview or a take home test and finally an on-site interview. The take home tests are the most time consuming. I later stopped taking interviews that required take home tests. I took my technical phone interviews in a quite place. Most interviewers used platforms like Hacker Rank or coderpad.io The on-site interviews were crucial for me in knowing the work environment. Though one can’t escape the open office this day and age, I was really looking for a quite working space.
A resource that I found really useful preparing for interviews was the CScareerquestions subreddit. They have discussions on interview experiences and you can also find guidance from industry experts. For those of you who aren’t on reddit yet, maybe this might be the time.
The job platforms that I used to find jobs were hired, indeed prime and vettery. They showcased my resume to companies for 2 weeks instead of me frantically applying to each company, the companies came to me. The recruiters from these platforms also provided advice on how to fix my resume and write a perfectly tailored profile.
A lot of time was spent organizing my trello board and google calendar. I spent most evenings practicing and interviewing with companies. I am glad the search is finally over though. In the end I accepted something that I really liked. I now get to work with REALLY smart people and learn some tools that I have been wanting to add to my skillset for sometime now.
This blog
I also spent more time writing last year. In all I wrote only 10 articles, but some of them got a lot of attention. I hope to keep that going this year as well.
My post on sublime text shortcuts got around 7000 views. While my post on best practices for designing APIs was a close second. I hope on publishing articles more frequently this year.
On a personal note
Last year was intense. I got married! My wife and I had to plan not one but two occasions, in the US and abroad. I am forever grateful for the love and support of friends and family and couldn’t be happier.
I hope you all had a wonderful year as well. I look forward to writing well thought out technical posts. I hope I can make learning Python and related technical concepts a little bit easier.
Some links mentioned above are referral links, if you prefer going to the site directly I’d understand.
I am writing a book!
While I do appreciate you reading my blog posts, I would like to draw your attention to another project of mine. I have slowly begun to write a book on how to build web scrapers with python. I go over topics on how to start with scrapy and end with building large scale automated scraping systems.
If you are looking to build web scrapers at scale or just receiving more anecdotes on python then please signup to the email list below.