I should write up my notes from talking to them. I explained that programming was like speaking a language computers understood and used Spanish and English as examples.

I defined code as the words computers understand.

I defined a program as a story made up of code that a computer knows how to read.

A couple of the great questions I got were "Do you like your job?" and "Do you like typing all day?"

Did any of them get the Super Mario reference? Why didn't you go with something more current as your theme?

I wanted to leverage the parallax scrolling background with Reveal and make it fun.

And as soon as I plugged in the projector the entire classroom erupted with shouts of "Mario!!!!"

That's great! I actually didn't expect them to recognize the 8bit graphics.

What really prompted me to ask was the "The princess is in another castle" reference at the end.

Being around 7-8 year olds pretty frequently, and having a 5 year old myself, I would have been surprised if they didn't recognize it and get excited.

My brother learned Cantonese fluently as a LDS Missionary. He then enlisted in the army after 9/11 and was given a battery of aptitude tests. I'm assuming this was one of them because he ended up at DLI learning Arabic and speaking that fluently as well.

DLI and being a Mormon missionary are about the two best places you can learn to speak a 2nd language fluently in a short amount of time.

> Before the participants took the half-day long tests they’d been sorted according to how well they knew a second language

Does doing well in the tests reflect how well someone will learn a second language, or does having already learnt a foreign language (e.g Cantonese) affect how well someone will learn another (e.g. Arabic) ? It could all be a mixup of causation and correlation!

Does this work with international numbers?

Yup. You can use any SMS-enabled Twilio number (or voice-enabled number if you change some of the code to respond to dial-tones) - list can be found at https://www.twilio.com/international

This is the kind of stuff they teach you in college with a CS degree.

It really shouldn't be. Struct packing is a purely technical skill, not really computer science at all; there's no general insight you gain from understanding it, and it's easy to look up and teach yourself if you need to learn it later. (Not that most programmers will ever need to do it; these days even many embedded systems have enough memory and cpu performance that this kind of microoptimization is a poor use of programmer time)

Not universally. None of my university's Java based curriculum or my brother's university's Python based curriculum mentioned this. My community college's C++ based curriculum mentioned it in passing.

I seem to remember it being mentioned in Bruce Eckel's excellent "Thinking in C++".

That said, I'm kinda curious how much this affects Objective C objects.

Never mentioned once in my curriculum at all...

Hey Randall! I've heard of Vidpresso! Congrats on the hustle. Team Wediges is super excited for you.

So glad Twitter is continuing the tradition of useless interview questions.

There is a distinction between the Startup Battlefield (companies that are launching) and the Hackathon (apps and hacks made in a constrained time period). His criticism seems to be leveled at the Battlefield judging.

"Avoid risks that might kill your startup." I think partnerships are one of the big, overlooked killers of startups.

Back Up

That is just bizarre. The entire point of the HOV lane is that you get a chance to pass non-HOV traffic.