blinks

It's more important to make code readable than clever, and more important to be simple than fast.

It tends to be pretty easy to speed up readable+simple code when you need to do so, but fixing broken fast+clever code is much more difficult.

> It does include a lot of arcana about how web application stacks work, the network and gateway protocols they use,...

This was my second phone screen at Google, for what it's worth.

I highly recommend looking into Inform7, effectively a text adventure IDE (though the community tends to call it "interactive fiction").

The language is a bit odd, and attempts to "read like English", but it provides so much scaffolding I feel like it's worth it.

If the system was namespaced, it'd be even better -- essentially make Meshtag just the translation layer (drawing to id), and then pass that identifier into any backend you like.

There are tens of thousands of employees at Google. Most of them interview. People are different.

For more concrete syntax, consider the following Python:

  >>> import re
  >>> route = re.compile(r'(?P<fb>^/foo/bar$)|(?P<fbd>^/foo/bar/\d+$)')
  >>> route.match('/foo/bar').groupdict()
  {'fb': '/foo/bar', 'fbd': None}
  >>> route.match('/foo/bar/1').groupdict()
  {'fb': None, 'fbd': '/foo/bar/1'}

If the fb group is set, act on the first route. If the fbd group is set, act on the second.

> understanding why it is done in this particular way is another

Isn't that the reason for comments in the first place?

> Either way, when you’re reading a linked page, you may still > be “at” awesomestuff.com, as clicking the back button on > your browser can instantly confirm. Effectively, > awesomestuff.com has stolen content from newyorker.com, just > as the compiler of “Most Thoughtful Essays” stole content > from me.

"At" is the wrong word. The browser is requesting content. If it's requesting content from awesomestuff.com that only newyorker.com has permission to copy, that's a copyright problem.

This is a very odd metaphor for a journalist to mistake. It's as if any reference they make in a piece is violating the copyright of the referenced item. Is reference that difficult of a concept to grasp?

Grep the article for "If someone had changed the calendar, wouldn't anyone else – say the Muslims? – have noticed?" -- a paragraph which ends with:

"All these areas would require an enormous amount of research either to validate or refute the theory, research that is unlikely to be undertaken by anyone not interested in rewriting the timeline."

I would ask if you had ever worked in IT.

There is a reason such jobs turn people into curmudgeons. It's not like they all started that way. You attempt to give a simple explanation as to what you're doing, but as soon as you say anything about their computer, they assume it's technical and tune out.

There are definitely people that would come into the office and learn how you fixed things, and those people were wonderful. Few and far between, though.

What's the point of Facebook? Twitter?