[nfbcs] Preparing for coding interviews

[Tracy Carcione]

Just FYI, most Bookshare books now come direct from publishers, and that's
been true for technical computer books for a long time.  Any errors in
them are not the result of a volunteer's OCR.
As a Bookshare proofreader myself, I notice plenty of errors in published
books that I would have fixed, but publishers' lack of proofreading isn't
something I can do anything about.
Tracy


> 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!
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