If you’re soon facing a technical job interview, here are a few resources you should probably check out before the big day.

Find Out What NOT To Say Or Do

This really applies to all types of job interviews, not just programming job interviews. I think it’s safe to say that you should really think your answer through before you blurt anything out or do anything. That’s quite common sense, but when you’re nervous, it’s easy to blank out and forget things. Well, you’re not alone.

There’s a relevant discussion on Stack Overflow called “What is the worst interviewee answer?” where you’ll see a lot of amusing things interviewees have said or done. Here are samples from the poll:

That was the top voted poll answer. Lesson to take away – don’t cheat. Surprised?

Here’s another one:

You probably should NOT say you invented invalid markup. Just a thought.

Here’s another simple thing you should not say:

Not putting a lot of effort into an interview might just bite you back later on. Lying on an interview might also bite you back.

For more responses, be sure to visit the original poll. Though you may feel tempted to mock some of the poll responses, just remember that when nervousness strikes on the big day, it’s not all fun and games anymore. What you can do before the big interview is realize that there are actual lessons to be learned from these funny responses.

Find Out What Coding Questions To Expect

There’s no guarantee that you will receive a coding question that’s been posted on the web but if you can answer some of the ones that have been asked and shared online, you might have a better chance of not freezing during this part of the interview.

Here are a few sample coding questions:

Test yourself with more questions on GlassDoor and Kundan Singh’s website, the latter of which also provides excellent general strategies for technical interviews. Don’t assume all data is given to you during a coding question, think out loud, etc.

If you want actual books on the topic, here are a few titles that have been recommended (links lead to Amazon):

• Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job
• Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutions

Get A Refresher In C/C++/etc. And Logic

If the last tip revealed that you are rusty in a programming language, here are a few places that will help you get a refresher or crashing course. The book, Programming Pearls (2nd edition) is a classic book that has been recommended quite a bit since it has lots of exercises and tutorials in C and C++ to help you think like a programmer. James also is posting a course here on MakeUseOf, so go check that out. There are also many websites with tutorials (and even video tutorials!) that you can review.

For actual coding practice, a site that I haven’t seen talked about anywhere but that my Java professor had us frequent a lot is CodingBat. It’s a site with simple (and sometimes difficult!) coding exercises in Java and Python. For practice with your logic thinking skills, Project Euler has lots of logic/coding challenges.

Find Out What The Overall Interview Experience Might Be Like

There’s a lot of people that have blogged about their overall experiences while being interviewed for corporations like Microsoft and Google. Even if you’re not interviewing with precisely these companies, your technical interview experience may be similar. Here are a few blog posts of interest:

• Peteris Krumins: My Job Interview At Google
• Corey Trager: Google Interview
• Rod Hilton: My Interview With Google
• Kristian Kristensen: My Job Interview at Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen

There are plenty more if you search around. From these posts, you’ll find out that the candidates had a lot of preparation beforehand. The other thing you’ll learn is that the interview process lasts some strenuous 6 hours or more. There are other little things that will help you get a feel for what to expect during on-site interviews, which come after the initial screening interviews. Regardless of how far you get in the interview process, it’s always good to know that there are similar people in your shoes that have survived these interviews, and it is always interesting to read their experiences.

I unfortunately didn’t have a lot of time to prepare for my interview, so I invite you to prepare yourself now with the steps outlined and get lots of practice in logic and coding problems.

Have you had a technical or programming interview before and wish to share your experience? Let us know in the comments!

Image credits: Ambrophoto, Andre Blais, winnond, kentoh

I’m a blogger, and as such, I am in need of a way to reach out to others while being interesting to readers. Wetoku can help!

Wetoku offers a simple way to meet someone online, record the meeting (or interview) and then share it with others. You may use it for video chat, conduct online interviews, etc.

Our Makeuseof authors have touched on several video chat type offerings that can help with online interviews (Tokbox, Eyejot, and Gmail’s video chat features). Well, wetoku makes meeting face to face with someone far away even easier. We’ll see how easy it is later in this article.

Wetoku takes simplicity to a whole new level. You login, set-up the interview, invite the interviewee, and hit the record button. It really is that easy!

Oh, and the simplicity doesn’t stop there! Sharing the video meetings/interviews with others involves all of just copying and pasting embedding code! Basically, you meet the person, hit record, hit stop, and the code pops right up! Copy and paste it like you would a YouTube video (or some other video sharing site) and there you go!

I would personally like to see some more options on the sharing end of things. I would like to see the ability to download the file for safe keeping AND for sharing on other social video sites like YouTube.  They are still working on things, and from what I can tell, they seem to be listening to feedback, so there’s still hope!

Setting up an account is really simple. Just sign up with the invitation code you were provided with (see the end of this article to get one). Once signed up and logged in, you’ll want to click the “start your interview” button and enter the information for the new online interview, including title, names and a description. Once that’s all set up, you’ll be faced with a cool invitation link which you promptly send to your interviewee anxiously awaiting the online interview:

You have to allow your camera to be detected, nothing new to web-based webcam operation. Once you and the interviewee are both on, the video will look similar to this (only with much prettier faces, I’m sure):

The round button is the record button. There is also a nifty little settings panel. I think that only pro accounts have the option of the higher quality videos (I tested the differences of quality and there is a difference). 

You can also change the volume of the microphone:

When you’re done recording, you can choose to redo it or publish it and you’re given the embed code. It’s that easy! When finished, you’ll have an online interview similar to this one conducted by wetoku Dave of Rick Calvert, CEO of Blogworld and New Media Expo:

And that’s just about all there is to it. With wetoku you can compete with the other “talking heads” out there, talking and interviewing people from all over the world!

Like I mentioned in the beginning, wetoku is a new company and they are still in private beta. They gave us 200 invites to share with you all! If you’re interested in an invite, just toss me an email timlenahan[at]makeuseof[dot]com with the EXACT phrase “wetoku invite” in the subject line (these emails will be filtered by the subject line so it must be exact or you may be overlooked) and I’ll email you an invitation code. First come first serve!

Check them out! When you do, let us know your thoughts in comments. And in case you’re familiar with some other tools to conduct video interviews share them with us in comments.

In those circumstances I need a good tool that can record the phone call so that I can later transcribe it into a text interview. If you want to know how do you use skype for these sort of interviews – my tool of choice for this task is HotRecorder. HotRecorder is one of the most effective tools to record any VoIP call, not only Skype. However, if you are a Skype user you can rest assured that it’s a tool that’s very well integrated with the Skype application.

Getting Set Up to Record a Skype Call

Installing and using HotRecorder is about as simple as it gets. There’s virtually no setup. After you run the install and launch the application, it attaches (literally) to your Skype window. Whenever you move your Skype window around the screen, the HotRecorder window stays attached at the upper left edge.

There are a few things that you may want to configure in HotRecorder depending on your preferences. For example, in the options menu, you can assign a folder on your computer to save all of the audio files. The Sound Quality and Recording Type settings are also important because they’ll ultimately determine how quickly the size of your audio file grows.

If you have a huge hard drive and are only recording the call for yourself, by all means keep the sound quality high and use Stereo sound. However, if your intent is to email the file or you’d like to store it on smaller media that doesn’t have quite as much storage capacity, you may want to consider using Medium or Low quality.

Recording a Skype Call

When you hit “Rec” and then dial a phone number or connect with another user on Skype, you’ll see the HotRecorder display status change to “Recording” and the size of the audio file updates as well so that you know how much space the audio file is going to consume on your hard drive or USB drive.

The current time duration of the call is also displayed, so if you’re running a Podcast or radio show and you don’t want the conversation to go beyond a certain time interval, you’ll know exactly how long the discussion is going. If there are parts of the conversation that you don’t want to record, just click on “Pause,” and then when you’re ready to start rolling again you can click “Rec” again and the call will continue.

Once you click on “Stop,” you’ll be presented with the screen above so that you can fill out details about the phone call including who you talked to and anything else you want to note about the call. The important field is “Conversation with” because the listing of your calls shows this clearly, and it’s one of the best ways you’ll have of remembering your calls. You can use any filename convention you like, so keep it in a format that you’ll be able to organize. In my case I sort all of my interviews by date, so I keep the date in the filename.

Once you click on save, you’ll see the application encoding the audio and saving it to file. One interesting thing to note here is how the audio will get encoded when you choose audio. HotRecorder saves the conversation in 2 channels – meaning that during playback your interviewee’s voice will play on the left and your voice will get played on the right. This is actually pretty cool if someone has stereo headphones. Unfortunately if one of your listeners has mono headphones or will be listening to your audio file on any mono device – the conversation will seem oddly “one-sided.”

Playback and Extra Options

Playing conversations back after you’re done recording is as simple as clicking on the “Player” tab.

When you click on the Player button, you’ll see a list of all of the conversations you’ve had. As I mentioned above, the saved recordings are displayed by who the conversation was with. If you accumulate a lot of conversations over time, there’s also a search feature available (this is where your description and keywords will come in handy).

There are a couple of cool extra features with HotRecorder, and one of them is an answering machine. Personally, I don’t use this feature – but I have to admit I like the fact that unlike your typical answering machine, HotRecorder will record the message that your caller leaves, attach the file to an email, and send off the email to any email address you like. You can be anywhere in the world and never miss a phone message again as long as you have Internet access to check your email.

If you run a podcast or a radio show, another cool feature are the “emotisounds,” which let you embed various sound effects into the conversation. This can get really hilarious if you play it right. Whenever someone says something that you don’t like, just click “boo” or if they’re boring you to death just click on “Snore” – you’ll have your listeners in stitches.

If you use HotRecorder the way that I do – that is, recording phonecalls for later playback and transcription to text, the free version is more than enough. I don’t care what format the file is stored in and I really don’t care about the advertisement panel at the top. However if you want to convert your files over to MP3 or WAV format so you can use them anywhere, you’ll need the inexpensive premium version that comes with an embedded AudioConverter.

You might also want to check out earlier Simon’s article that lists a couple of alternative programs to record Skype calls.

How do you use Skype to do interviews? Do you have your own solution for recording VoIP calls? Share them with the MUO readers in the comments section below!

Q: How did you come up with the idea for a music album torrents site?

A: I’m a music lover, and I always use BitTorrent to get my fix. I was disappointed with all the public indexers and the private trackers. I found the experience of searching for music in the first ones very tiresome, always having to navigate through a lot of irrelevant search results and dead torrents.

I grew tired too of the strict rules of most of the private trackers, and the elitism of some of their communities.

Those reasons motivated me to create a new kind of music torrents site, open for everyone and that offered a user experience comparable to the best e-commerce websites.

We all who constantly seek new music deserve something better, so I tried to build a website I would enjoy using, a website where:

The main content is always the music, sorted accordingly by albums, artist, and genres. The torrent files is the way to get what you want, and not an end in itself. Search and download for music was a pleasant visual experience, and not a burden. You always have a lot of information about what you are about to download, to make sure that is what you are actually looking for.

It’s not only about the search, it should help you to discover new music, always offering recommendations of albums and artists similar to the ones you like.

And above all things, that is fun to navigate freely, exploring music by genre, artist, year, similarity, etc., and always one click away to download whatever you like.

I thought that many people would share my point of view, and appreciate this new approach for a music torrents site. Being an experienced web developer, I decided to make it real.

Q: Has the RIAA/IFPI threatened to sue?

A: Yes, they already threatened us many times citing the DMCA, a law that doesn’t apply in my country, and where no other legislation is applicable to what we do. [I won't disclose my location or name because]

Sooner or later, the RIAA, IFPI or a similar organization will try to shut us down, so, the less they know about us, the better.

Q: What would you like to see from artists and labels regarding piracy?

A: They need to realize that their old business models won’t work anymore in the digital age, ["¦] we are living a revolution in the way the music is being consumed and distributed. They will all need to think outside the box and be willing to take risks if they want to survive, trying new ideas in order to adapt to a scenario dominated by the P2P technologies, [which are] unstoppable ["¦].

Trent Reznor is a fine example of how the embrace the internet and thrive as a musician without a label, a middleman that should be gone soon.

Q: How do you feel about the ongoing lawsuit against ThePirateBay?

A: The final verdict will be very important and representative, to be taken in consideration by all the admins of torrents sites ["¦], and specially those who are based in the European Union.

And I’m afraid that’s the real goal of this trial, a political trial that has nothing to do with justice as trying to serve as dissuasive propaganda.

Personally, I think that any law that see as criminals nearly all the youths of today and those who give them what they want [..] is clearly wrong. ["¦] Of course, we’re in the same side,I could find myself in the same place, eventually. I wish we where bigger and able to do something to help them.

Q: How hard was it to develop the backend code and how long did it take?

A: The coding wasn’t as hard as defining the UI design, layout and navigation, that took me many iterations to get it right. It took me a few months to get a working prototype, that showed that the project could be viable, useful, and worth to be finished. In total, the development of the platform took me one year, working the first seven or eight months part time besides my day job.

Q: Why not let users report bad albums rather than hand picking by administrators?

A: I believe it’s safer this way, stopping torrents with spam and viruses before they are available for download. Besides, although the process that gets the metadata for the albums is automated, it requires supervision and manual approval, and that could be tiresome and boring for the users, leading them to upload less torrents.

Q: How do you plan on monetizing the site?

A:  For now, we’re focusing on building a community, drive more traffic and add even more features that could put us ahead other competing websites.

I guess that the obvious choice would be putting ads, but I’m reluctant to do that. In the meantime I will try to find another way to monetize the website.

Q: Would you like to tell us about your favorite 3 albums of all time?

A: Wow, this is by far the most difficult question. So hard that I’m going to cheat, and list a few of my favorite artists instead:

• Johann Sebastian Bach, by far my most listened, since I was a kid.
• Other classical composers: Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Paganini, Vivaldi, Handel and a few others. Astor Piazzolla, Björk, Portishead, Nine Inch Nails, The Mars, Volta Morphine, Sonic Youth, Massive Attack, Thievery Corporation, Tricky, Death Cab for Cutie, The Decemberists, Mogwai, Tool.

Q: What can you tell us about your audio gear and listening patterns?

A: My gear is nothing too fancy, a moderately good sound system with the aux[iliary] input connected to my iMac, from which I play all the music with iTunes (I don’t use or buy CDs anymore, and I don’t listen to the radio either). I worry more about convenience and compatibility, than absolute sound quality, for example I don’t use lossless audio formats, and neither do I want the ultimate audio gear.

I listen to music every day, all day long, at home or on the road with my iPod: it’s the cornerstone of my life.

I hope I asked all the questions you wanted ““ but if not ““ leave a comment and I’ll pass along the questions. Visit Coda.fm music album torrents site and experience a new kind of music downloading ““ then come back and tell us what you think about it. We thank the Coda.fm Admin for this great interview.

To recap, Digsby is a messaging application which lets you talk to people on all of the major instant messaging networks such as MSN, AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, Gtalk and even Facebook Chat. More than that it also lets you connect up email accounts and social networks accounts including Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It also supports customization, skinning and even synchronizes your account details and Digsby skins between computers.

Steve Shapiro is the project manager for Digsby and he took the time to answer a few questions concerning this project:

Tell us about the ‘Digsby’ logo/mascot…

We wanted something that was a mascot and not just a logo so that it would “be Digsby” – we felt this would be a good way to brand it as a consumer friendly product. Another important aspect of it was that it needed to look good as a 16×16 or 32×32 icon since it is used on the desktop and in the tray.

How many people do you have working on this project? Is this purely a hobby project or do you hope eventually Digsby will provide some kind of revenue stream?

Digsby is developed by a company so we do need to pay the rent and keep the lights on.

What about this project aren’t you currently happy with? Is any part of the application frustrating you feature-wise?

We would love to finish stabilizing the Windows build so we can release for Mac and Linux!  We’ve had tons of requests.

What Instant Messaging application did you use before Digsby?

I used AIM 5.9 + Gtalk.

What is your personal favourite feature?

The email integration.  It’s nice not to have to keep checking my inbox through out the day.  If I get an email that’s important I can open it right from there.   If it’s spam, I can mark it appropriately without ever going to my inbox.

I’m interested to hear your comments on the whole ‘perpetual beta’ a lot of companies have going on these days. Are you working towards an actual version 1.0 release, or is Digsby going to do a Google for the next few years?

It’s a little more complex than that.  There will never really be a 1.0 or a 2.0 but it will also not stay in beta for years.  We adopted a development cycle that is more typical of a website than a software product. A software product typically releases version 1.0 and then there is a massive effort to release 2.0. You need to then convince people to start using 2.0 because it is better while also providing support for 1.0.

With a website, every time you visit the site you see the newest version.  Digsby auto-updates each time you run it so you are always running the latest release. We release new versions almost every week.  Check out http://changelog.digsby.com.  Once it is a bit more stable we will remove the alpha or beta tag that we put at the end of each release but the fast release cycle will remain unchanged so there won’t be a version 1.0 and version 2.0…..just constant builds that keep making Digsby better and better.

Any hints you’d like to share about something big which is yet to come?

Mac + Linux releases!

What do you think of Digsby becoming the ‘Firefox’ of instant-messaging applications?

We have seen that tag line in many reviews and are honored by it.  Firefox is a great browser and being put on the same level makes us smile and encourages us to push even harder to improve Digsby.

Do you have any opinions you would care to share on the latest Windows Live Messenger?

It’s a great IM client in my opinion.

So thanks to Steve.

If you haven’t tried Digsby out yet then I would very much recommend it!