Random Rants

[Giles]

Confederate flag and Swastikas, they're a nice bunch....

[Seul]

Love thy neighbour (unless he's different )...

[ROman]

I thought of numerous things to reply. I haven't had enough to drink yet.

[steelworker]

Confederate flag and Swastikas, they're a nice bunch....

And a big ol' SS in case the giant swastika isn't enough...   

[jason1967]

As @ROman said I’d been thinking of things to say about that but in all honesty it left me speechless.

[Stuart.T]

So the cycle continues. Either the female on the ehhem, far right, of the picture is pregnant, or it is Matt Lucas.

It was heartening to see that the great English public made international news for their thoughtful, considerate, compassionate behaviour on Bournemouth beach. The locals I've spoken to in Southend, where I work (finally back in the office from time to time) have said they feel trapped in their own homes. Most of those visiting are Londoners, but some reported driving 3 1/2 hours... To Southend?? Are you fucking stupid?

[jordanscollected]

I don't own any Iron Heart SS shirting or shorts, so Minnesota's blazing hot summers require me to resort to "mall clothes". I went to toss on one of my go to's this morning and saw this. Have no clue how it happened, but it's a major fail and all the more reason to buy better engineered clothing.

end rant

[Giles]

Yep, that is a major fail.....

[Graeme]

It's Monday, so obviously time for another rant from the world of job hunting.

I've got a coding test to do, and I have to write an Android app that does the following:

• Read in JSON data from a file.
• Request permission to use the phone's location service.
• Use the location service and the data from a file to find the nearest city. (Given everything is in latitude and longitude, than involves looking up an algorithm to calculate distance from these.)
• Make a call to a web service to request weather data for that city.
• Display the data in a simple UI.
• Have a fallback to display a message that the app needs location permissions to be enabled to work properly.

Apparently this is all to be completed in two and a half hours and it's a timed test. I think that each step is probably a couple of hours work. (Any developers here with any thoughts on my estimates?)

I had a crack at the test last week, got part of the way through, and basically submitted a note saying that you've got to be kidding if you expect this to be done in the given timeframe. I emailed the testing company to raise my concerns, and their reply was that other people complete it within two and a half hours, but it's a real achievement to do that.

I'm currently about ten hours in, with another five hours to complete it. And that's recycling a little code from another project...

I'll probably write another rude email to the testing company.

[Snowy]

What's the testing platform?

I could probably do the below in 2hrs now, and I'm not a SDE. It wouldn't be optimal, but it'd work.

Read in JSON data from a file.
Request permission to use the phone's location service.
Use the location service and the data from a file to find the nearest city.
Make a call to a web service to request weather data for that city.
Display the data in a simple UI.
Have a fallback to display a message that the app needs location permissions to be enabled to work properly.

This, I'm not sure if there's an easy way to solve that counts. There's URLs and libraries that solve this out there many of them.. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20169467/how-to-convert-from-longitude-and-latitude-to-country-or-city  for EG If that counts, yeah I could do it in 2hrs.

Use the location service and the data from a file to find the nearest city. (Given everything is in latitude and longitude, than involves looking up an algorithm to calculate distance from these.)

[Graeme]

It's written in Kotlin (or Java) on the Android platform, so it's a bit more verbose than JavaScript.

I used the Haversine formula to get distances between latitude and longitude coordinates. It's not necessarily accurate, or efficient when used on an enormous array of values, but it works.

https://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong.html

The part that I found tricky was the permissions system, which I hadn't used before.

[Snowy]

I suspect your quality bar is too high for these. As a hiring manager who dishes out coding assessments more mundane than what you're doing here, I only assess for functional or correctness, performance and edge case handling mostly not expected at all. Not about what you know, it's how well you can google and throw something together that makes some kind of sense. Lower your standards 

[Graeme]

Thanks. I think that I'm just a bit burnt out by continually job hunting, picking up a short contract, and repeating. I feel like I spend more time writing coding tests than production code.

[Snowy]

Good luck! Contracting is a tough gig for sure (I did 10 years, happy to leave it to the younger folks these days)