My interviews with Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft
Now that you know about my recent departure from Google, it is time to look into how the whole interviewing process went with all of Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft. Read on for details on engineering levels, the timeline of all three processes, and some key observations of each.
October 23, 2020
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Tags:
<a href="/tags/facebook">facebook</a>, <a href="/tags/google">google</a>, <a href="/tags/microsoft">microsoft</a>, <a href="/tags/personal-story">personal-story</a>, <a href="/tags/twitter">twitter</a>
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21 minutes)
A teeny tiny review of Twitterville
After about two months, I finally finished reading Twitterville by Shel Israel (@shelisrael). One of my followers (@drio) asked for a review of the book, so here is my attempt to do so. But first, a quick summary: Twitterville is a book that focuses on the dynamics of Twitter. It starts by explaining how Twitter works, but that is only a tiny introductory part of the book. The majority of the contents explain how people and business interact with each other by means of Twitter, and it does so by providing lots of real-life stories. The stories range from topics as diverse as businesses offering deals, to individuals raising funds for specific causes. The book is easy to read and is well structured, and as you read through it you will realize that the author had to do some major research efforts to collect all the stories that he presents. I personally enjoyed the first half of the book a lot, but at some point I ran out of time for reading and my interest dropped. It was hard to pick on reading again because the book becomes quite repetitive after a few chapters; just keep in mind that it is a collection of personal experiences organized by different major topics and you won't be disappointed. Twitterville has changed my view on Twitter. I have discovered many "use cases" for Twitter that I could not imagine and, as many people do, I used to disregard Twitter as a useless "status updates" system. Today, however, I have set up several Twitter searches to monitor some topics of my interest and I engage with people that I did not know beforehand. It kinda feels like a world-wide unorganized chat room to me... but, as the author mentions many times, the way you see and use Twitter is up to you and you alone!
January 27, 2011
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Tags:
<a href="/tags/books">books</a>, <a href="/tags/twitter">twitter</a>
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2 minutes)
Getting the hang of Twitter searches
I have had a Twitter account (@jmmv) for several years already but I have never leveraged its power. Why? Well... basically because I have never known how. The Twitterville book by Shel Israel (@shelisrael), which I have been reading lately, has opened my mind quite a bit. Twitter is not so much about posting status updates, but more about sharing content and starting/joining conversations with other people. Today I like to think of Twitter as a world-wide chat-room. Twitterville mentions many times that the key in Twitter usage is to search for content. But finding content among all the junk that floats in Twitter is hard. I had seen that it is possible to actually do searches in the Twitter web page, but that is not really usable. Yes, you can search once for something you are interested in... but you know what, you can do the same in any search engine and get more relevant results. To me, what has made a difference is to switch to a client that does actually support live searches (TweetDeck in my case). With such a client, all you have to do is create a search for any given topic you may be remotely interested in and status updates will just pop up in your client as soon as someone posts about that particular topic. Easy, huh? See, it's like joining your favorite #topic chat-room. With this in mind, you can, for example, create a search such as "#netbsd OR #freebsd OR #openbsd" to get real-time tweets about these BSD operating systems. It is a fact that you will see loads of junk (disable popup notifications recommended), but you will catch some interesting content. And the best of it, you can reply to that content. This is particularly useful because you can (try to) fix misconceptions that people have before they spread out too much. That said, the value you see in Twitter and how you use it, is fully up to you. Different people will find different use cases, all of them interesting on their own. And to conclude, I have to confess that while the above may seem obvious to many, it is something that has escaped my mind until last week.
December 17, 2010
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Tags:
<a href="/tags/twitter">twitter</a>
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2 minutes)
Twitter and other news
Don't know why but I finally succumbed to Twitter today, as if I did not have enough things to waste time. You can follow me with the jmmv nick. I just noticed this post comes after more than a month since the last one; my apologies. I do not have any free time these days to think about writing decent posts nor doing anything else. My current work is basically attending class, writing reports, reading papers and going to the gym (this last thing only when possible). One of the things that drew a lot of my time recently was the writing of a paper for WIOSCA 2008, and I was just noticed of its acceptance. Most likely you won't see me there though. Oh, and it's definitive. I will be interning at Google NYC from late-July to late-October this year! Extremely impatient for July to arrive. Will be joining the Site Reliability Engineering team.
May 17, 2008
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Tags:
<a href="/tags/google">google</a>, <a href="/tags/twitter">twitter</a>
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1 minute)
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