[nfbcs] Preparing for coding interviews

[David Tseng]

Hey Amanda,

Firstly, congrats on graduating. Having gone through a CS undergraduate
program at a large research university, I know how much of a challenge, in
the wrong ways, it can be.

As for interview tips. I would suggest the following:
- read books from Learning Ally. Bookshare is great, but suffers from the
same issues as all OCRed text. The errors, unfortunately, frequently happen
for the most crucial parts of the content since mathematical notation
breaks OCR engines...
- for problems, try top coder. There are plenty of other sites with a nice
writeups of problems including glassdoor, stackoverflow, etc. Cracking the
coding interview is great, but only one source.
- if you have more time (maybe for future interviews), watch online
lectures. One particularly awesome course is MIT's undergrad algo course
 which uses "Introduction to Algorithms" by CLRS (available on Learning
Ally).
- learn to use linux. Just by using linux, you'll start depending on
writing code to get your basic computing tasks and more accomplished. More
than anything else, linux usage encourages writing your own tools which in
turn increases your ability to handle a variety of technical interview
questions.
- contribute to open source. Beyond the usual suspects like NVDA, Orca,
Espeak, Brltty, Liblouis, and other accessibility tools, there are tons of
things out there on github and beyond. By learning how to build these tools
and understanding how they're built, things like git, clang, make, ld, etc
become second nature. Furthermore, contributing patches to something you
yourself use and care about and interacting with others that work on the
same thing will make you infinitely more ready to tackle any potential
employer's goals.
- practice with a mock interviewer in the same conditions you'll have
- ask your potential employer for accomedations. If it's online, ask for a
setup you are most comfortable with.

In closing, there's plenty of stuff out there on interviewing. A quick
search yields lots of good blogs and others experiences. Just keep at it
and you'll figure out what works best for you. Let us know how things go!