I was browsing through the Programmers stack exchange Q&A website yesterday and I stumbled upon a question about the fairness or unfairness of some interview questions that the candidate was asked to answer. Basically, the candidate was asked to answer questions out of his field of competence and felt cheated by the interview. In all fairness, he was a recent graduate and probably didn’t have that much experience interviewing.

In his question, he mentioned that he wanted to write the company to tell them about the unfairness of the questions. Fortunately, the Programmers community responded well and told him that this was not the right thing to do, however a few people did agree with him. Since he might not be the only one feeling that way, I decided to write a few (non-technical) things that every programmer should know when applying for a programming job. Read more »

Style guides aren’t new, the printing industry has been using them for a long time, but we don’t see them nearly often enough on web projects. Just as a coding guide is useful for programmers, a style guide is useful for front-end developers. A style guide is useful for all projects, but it really shines on large projects with many front-end developers or projects that you will be coming back to regularly.

A style guide can help:

• A group of developers produce consistent looking user interfaces
• Bringing in new developers that much faster without having to mentor them as much
• Developers focus on content rather than thinking about how to display the information

Read more »

Last week I wrote an introductory guide about how to develop web applications. I kept it short and simple on purpose because an in-depth description of the topic would fit in a book. I’d rather give an overview and then selectively dig in each step as I see fit.

Today, I will discuss about an important decision in the life of a web application developer, choosing a web development framework. It is important to note that choosing a framework is more about finding one that you’re comfortable with rather than finding the best. All the popular ones are good in their own way and are used to run all sorts of web apps. Read more »