0x54D5

Oxford Valley Mall is far from dead. The food court is always pretty lively on Fridays and Saturdays. The Forever 21 next to the food court is constantly packed with teenagers. I literally went there not long ago with my girlfriend and we had to stand in line at the register. Not exactly dead.

The guy just went on a random Tuesday instead of a Saturday. Of course it's going to be dead. The parking lot also has a really good theater seating style movie theater. Both Oxford Valley Mall and Neshaminy Mall are on Route 1 going north out of Philadelphia and also have I-95 going by. Also the Mall has Sesame Street Theme Park right outside it's parking lot and across the street is a whole other plaza containing a Best Buy, A Home Depot, a Lowes, and a bunch of other stuff. Honestly the only reason the mall can't keep full is cause of all the competitions nearby. The area itself is actually super nice just to the west of the mall with lots of properties rising in value.

I used to run a Gaming LAN Center in 2005 in Neshaminy Mall. The area is served by FIOS and Comcast.

As to why buses come to the mall? Really? Old people like to walk around during the day in the mall just for fun. People also use the bus to get to and from work. Most of the routes are going to and from Philly with a few connecting the various regional rail stations. Growing up we all wished there was just one bus from the center of Newtown to the mall so we wouldn't have to ask our parents to take us.

If you actually stay just around Levittown there's a lot of old crap from the 60s in a clearly abandoned and/or ruined state but that's not really indicative of the area.

Do you know how to write SQL queries? Have you ever mapped an ORM to a data store? What about rate limiting an API? Ever had to setup Single Sign On? Have you ever scaled anything from 100 users to 100,000 users? How do you handle job running? Concurrency? How would you debug your server locking up due to 100% CPU usage? Ever configured a dev environment on local with xdebug? Breakpoints? Command line tools? Ever normalized data between multiple third party APIs? What does normalization even mean to you? What about unit testing? Mocking data pre-test and cleaning up after test? How do you make it fast? What's the autoloader? How do you properly setup composer? Tabs or spaces? Why? Windows, OSX, or Linux? Why? Favorite IDE? Why? Are their opinions so strong they can't work with others? On and on it goes.

In the past 6 months at my job I've dealt with all of the above issues and more. I would still probably fail most of the exercise in your Github repo. Mainly because all of them are irrelevant to the actual work and honestly I can't be bothered to sit here and memorize various math algorithms that have quite literally nothing to do with the work.

PHP comes with with 13 different sort functions. None of them test you for how to write a bubble sort. I'd rather a candidate know when to use one over another instead of knowing how to write just one or two of them from scratch. Here's the thing though. I've written bubble sorts before. In college. When learning C & Java. In no way shape or form do I ever practice them or actually remember them at a moments notice. I look them up like a normal person if I ever actually need them.

When I interview a candidate I don't use any of these nonsense exercises. I have one small code exercise at the end which makes use of recursion. The rest of the interview is an open ended series of questions on systems and just basic "shooting the shit" style questions. The nuance of how you answer the questions tells me everything I need to know about a candidate.

On the flip side if I'm the candidate and someone asks me one of these I know they actually suck at interviews and my immediate instinct is to walk out. I try anyway to be polite and not burn any bridges and most of the time I'll come up with a correct solution but again my initial instinct is "I don't actually want to work here anymore".

So what do you do instead? Be creative.

Have fill-in exercises. Write an abstract class and an interface and have them build you a class that implements both.

Write some code with obvious mistakes. Have them fix it.

Build a full from scratch login system. Have a user already in the database with a hash already there. Make them fill in the authenticate function. Watch them not use password_hash and ask them why. Make them use Google.

No exercise should take more then 15 minutes. The majority of the interview should be you digging deeper into their previous roles. Have them tell you success stories or cool hacks they've put together. You'll learn way more about them both as a person and as a developer.

We only use it because Comcast couldn't keep our connection working. We're literally on Market street two blocks from Independence Hall. Within 5 blocks is the Philadelphia Mint. Numerous Federal courts, etc. And we still can't get a reliable connection.

Philly Whisper still goes down occasionally. We've had it go down twice in the past 60 days. They are super responsive but at the end of the day the internet going down for hours is still money lost.

I have FIOS at home and I've only ever seen it go down at night and it's because of a router update.

Disclaimer: I used to work for Comcast. Would not recommend.

Driving in the United States is very region dependent.

In cities it's everyone for themselves. Lots of speeding and general shenanigans. Especially Boston, Philly, NYC, Baltimore, SF, LA, DC, and Miami.

In the mid west drivers are generally more laid back and follow the speed limits more.

In rural parts of the Northeast like upstate NY and PA you'll find drivers a lot like Germans. Stay right, pass left.

PA turnpike has a speed limit of 70 but it's normal to see people doing 80-85 especially on I-80. But I-95 near Philly is even worse. Posted speed limit of 55. People doing 80 regularly in the left lane.

This is basically almost autobahn speeds.

For the non-mericans: 80 MPH ~= 128.748 KPH

American roads are all over the place as far as maintenance goes. The interstate road between NYC and Philadelphia is extremely high quality and you can easily hit 120 MPH (193.121 KPH).