DEV Community: Mujeeb Ishaque

2nd Interview Experience(Python-Dev)

Mujeeb Ishaque — Thu, 14 Nov 2019 20:05:18 +0000

Introduction

I found the post on a local facebook page that shares IT jobs in my area. They were looking for a python developer with experience in Linux and RESTFUL API. It was an entry-level position. I'd say the whole process took 3 days. I got call on Monday, got invited for an interview on Wednesday.

Interview Questions/Answers

As always, the interview started with a brief introduction. You need something, tea/coffee/water? I said, No. Well, let's get started.

1 - Where are you working as of now?
Answer - a local startup

2 - Why are you leaving them?
Answer - Not leaving them, they are closing. The startup is dead.

3 - What was your role there?
Answer - Python dev.
(stared at the resume for quite some time)

4 - Which distro?
Answer - Ubuntu.

5 - Experience in Python? Practical experience.
Answer - 1.5 Years

6 - On the scale of 1-10 where would you rate your OOP skills?
Answer. Around 9. I have not written much comprehensive code. Mostly, everything that needs to be done can be found online or there is always a library for it. Python makes things easy for you.

7 - What's the difference between abstract class and interface?
Answer - I had forgotten this. I recollected things about interface and I answered about it but was not able to remember anything about abstract class.

8 - Sorry, what's an interface?
Answer - PyQt5, I use it to create the interfaces. Oh, you mean, The interface? Ah, yeah, it's ........

8a - Difference between encapsulation and abstraction?
Answer - Abstraction hides unwanted details. Encapsulation hides the data and code in one Unit.

8b - What's polymorphism?
Answer. Many forms of a function. It's like, when you need to have a separate definition for the same function as in parent class, you use polymorphism, it's called polymorphism, yeah. The word polymorphism means many forms.

9 - What about Flask? Flask vs Django?
Answer. Flask is good. I prefer it because it's minimalistic.

10 - Do you know Flask?
Answer - Not much, I've worked with it. But I primarily do Django.

11 - You can develop API in Django?
Answer - yes. And I have made one, it's for quotes.

What do you like about Django? Answer - Admin Panel, Model Forms, Builtin-Database.

12 - hmmm, In your resume, it says that you've worked on an IoT product? What were your contributions?
Answer - Not much, had to improve the code they already had, schedule a task, check for internet connectivity and run a task on startup.

12a - Which distro for the IoT product?
Answer - Stretch. Raspbian. and I tried arch, it wasn't working for some reason and due to time constraints I quit doing experiments and went with raspbian.

12b - How many products you sold?
Answer - None. No one bought it.

13 - Which database do you like?
Answer - SQLite and MySQL

14 - Most proficient in?
Answer - Mysql

15 - Here's a table(he drew it on a paper). remove redundancy or just check for redundancy for names. We need unique.

Answer: I'd use stored procedures or maybe not, let's see. SELECT NOT DISTINCT names from Table;

No--- maybe not, let's try another way.

SELECT COUNT(names) FROM Table having COUNT(names) > 1;

16 - What's the difference between stored procedure and a function?
Answer = IDK. (There's a difference though)

17 - RestAPI work with which data format?
Answer - Json.

18 - Do you have any questions?
Answer - Can you please let me know if I am not selected through email as early as possible. HR Dept. don't send an email of rejection mostly, they just don't respond.

yeah, I will talk to HR about this. Have a good one.

Me: Thanks, thank you for your time.

Python Vs C++ (My Experience)

Mujeeb Ishaque — Sat, 19 Oct 2019 12:48:50 +0000

An Introduction

C++

Ladies and gentlemen, C++ is not a game, it's a powerful, typed, compiled language that powers everything from a random jet flying over your head to pretty much all the supercomputers of China.

Python

Python is an interpreted OO programming language and you get it pre-installed with approx. all the Linux distros. It can make websites, provide insights about the data, make predictions and those automated testing/hacking scripts that are available all over Github.

Python is not as most people boost it to be. It's certainly not the easiest programming language to learn. If you ask an experienced C++ programmer about his/her view, probably, they will say one thing for sure, "I hate indentation. Braces make the code look more organized." (not my view, I am a social person. I've asked this question to many fellows and got this response)

My Experience

C++

I got introduced to C++ while working with Data structures and algorithms and in the course "programming fundamentals". So, first things first, people/students really hate c++. They look like they are trying to survive the c++ course. In my experience, it's not that hard. it just takes time.

So the programs compile really fast and C++ itself is a really fast programming language. Back then, I wanted to crack the username and password of the website and I opted dictionary attack. The dictionary that I downloaded from the web was 200MB and the passwords were related to Europe and the US only. Let me explain, so the names of people in the US or UK are like. James, John, and the password might be "john123" or "james67858" respectively, but I am from Pakistan and names of people are more like Abdul, Muhammad. So that dictionary was futile, I had to make one for my region. I did make it, one in Python and another one in C++ just to re-learn c++ at that time because I had moved on to C#.

Python program was executed and after several seconds, I'd see the CWD populated with passwords.txt file with all the different combinations, etc.

Now here's the wonderful thing, I re-wrote the same code in C++ and executed it on the terminal and it finished. I mean, I executed it and it finished immediately. So, no wait? I checked the CWD for the file and it was there. I mean, it was so fast that I thought that maybe my code didn't produce a passwords.txt file but it did. damn fast!

C++ for GUI based applications isn't easy. All the programs that I wrote with C++ were purely terminal based and would probably expect an argument. I wanted to go advance so I started learning about multithreading and parallel processing and boy let me out. I didn't commit a crime please let me go to my family safe and sound. I ran away to Python.

Python

If you're doing things perfectly than nothing is easy. It stands correct for all fields of science and art. When you follow best practices and naming conventions, It sometimes takes several hours just to come up with a descriptive class and method names.

Multithreading and parallel processing are comparatively easy. Your productivity increases with python. You have an awesome package manager for python, you can share your required libraries/modules with one command i.e.

pip freeze > requirements.txt

You can import libraries and hack the world sometimes with just 3 lines of code. I taught myself Django. Again, it's hard but takes less time(python increases productivity). For Example, normally, you would install server software and database and set up your project after several minutes but with python, it's just

django-admin startproject project_name

that's it. You have a built-in server, built-in database, etc.

Browser automation is however relatively easy but it requires general programming experience. You literally have to install two packages i.e. selenium and beautifulsoap and you're on your way to scrap data and do things.

You can make a neural network in under 20 lines of code. You can create a network automation script using ssh modules and netmiko. You can create a GUI using either tkinter or PyQt5 etc. You can do lots of things with fewer lines of code.

Python is a great programming language that offers a lot of packages to make your life easier. The things that you want to do are probably already done by someone else somewhere and for some reason, there's also a library to do that specific task that offers a lot of abstraction and functionalities out of the box. It is wonderful to know that your workload has reduced exponentially just because there's a module already present that helps you achieve your goal.

Conclusion

I've had more enjoyment, more productivity and more help using python. I am not saying that C++ was hard, it just takes more time and brains which I lack. However, I still code in C++ because it's C++ and powerful/fast.

Lastly, python wins at certain tasks but c++ is certainly not behind. I've started to think that it's stupid to compare 2 languages with each other but this wasn't a comparison Afterall, it was just an experience.

Django Developer Interview Questions/Answers. (Beginners)

Mujeeb Ishaque — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 19:15:44 +0000

I will abstain from drama and would like to jump straight to questions and their answers:-

Q#1. What do you like about django? Or the same question can be re-phrased as what are the features of django?

Answer: Django is a secure, fast and rapid application development(RAD) framework. It offers/features are:

● Auto Admin Interface (CRUD)
● Templating
● Form handling
● Internationalization
● Session, user management, role-based permissions, messages
● Object-relational mapping (ORM)

Q#2. What architecture does Django follow? Or Is Django an MVC framework?
Answer: Django follows MTV pattern/architecture. MTV stands for Model, Template, View.

Q#3. How to write views in Django?
Answer. There are 2 primary methods to write views in Django. First is the Django function-based views and second is Django's class-based views. Function-based views are simple and are a better option to go for if you know that you have to create less than 8-10 views.

Q#4. What’s the current version of Django? Or (What Django version are you currently working with)?
Answer. Django 2.2

Q#5. How to create a model in Django? Or Can you name some model fields that you’ve created before during your projects?
Answer. Models in Django inherit from the models class. The class offers multiple fields to work with. Fields that I’ve used and are used extensively in any project are:

CharField(max_length=128)(tell the interviewer that max_length parameter is not optional)
ImageField() - tell them that the ImageField inherits from FileField()
BooleanField() - tell them it’s best to practice to use a default value for a boolean field.
IntegerField() - Also mention the PositiveIntegerField()
DateTimeField() - Tell them that you can pass auto_now_add=True as a parameter to get current timestamp saved into datetimefield()

Q#6. How would you check your Django installation version? (I've seen people guessing the answer).
Answer. Python -m django --version

Q#8. Can you use MySQL with Django?
Answer. Yes, you can. You can use, MySQL, SQLite, Oracle, PostgreSQL etc

Q#9. What does makemigrations command do?
Answer. It creates migrations for the models that you define in models.py file.

Q#10. So you said, Django follows MTV pattern. You mean Django doesn’t follow MVC, right?
Answer. MTV closely resembles MVC. Because, the framework handles the controller part itself so most things happen only in models, views, and templates.

Q#11. Think of this scenario. You’re a django developer here. A big company, take Tesla as example, wants us to make them a website where the website handles all the feedback from the clients that are currently using tesla as their primary vehicle of transport. How would you make that type of website, sometimes, you might get 1000 reviews/feedbacks in an hour. How would you design the database too. Also tell about the security. If you know about front-end, what front-end technology would you prefer?

Anwer. Start by asking further questions and remove any doubt or question you have. Tell them how you would make it. When it comes to database design, explain all the fields that you are going to use. If the feedback is coming from unregistered clients than you might not know their location. In that case, you will determine the location using ip-location services and store the ip-address in GenericIPAddressField() field. Continue with more explanation and if you know any front-end technology than explain why would you prefer that particular technology instead of certain other technologies available in the market.

Me, my friends, and CS Degree Experience.

Mujeeb Ishaque — Sun, 08 Sep 2019 20:49:31 +0000

I made up my mind even before getting into the university that I wanted to gain technical and practical experience in computer science. I thought that I'd become pretty good after learning all those computer science courses like the intro to web dev, data-science, databases, os.

Expectations were to make compiler, embedded software, websites and some interactive software for people but I ended up with 17 errors in 5 lines of code in the first week(C++).

Landed 3.4 GPA in the first semester. It would've been better if I didn't get a D in Maths.

Wait, it's getting derailed. I wanted to talk about me, my friends, and some views about formal education.

Motivation

There are lots of new people here. People that are pursuing their education and that are serious about their future. People who want to do something for society. People who want to make their parents proud, just like me. You can. You can do it but it's not easy and life keeps things balanced. The time when you think you are getting good, you'll get rolled by life pretty bad. It's all about persistence. Without teachers, the concepts that take one hour to learn will take months to learn. Respect the teachers and educational institutes but equally, hate the management and people that are in the authority. They are after money and they don't care about you. They need fees first.

In uni. Some friends got rolled, some loved the experience, others wanted a degree, some female friends got married etc. Let's talk about them and about my views below.

1 - Freedom

Freedom was what we wanted and freedom was all we got in Uni. It spoiled some, more freedom got dangerous for some, some started lacking discipline. People who at first would complete their assignments days before the deadline, were now lazy because there were no consequences except you'd have to re-take the course. In school, parents would make a big deal out of a monthly test report but now we were grown up, no one to question except ourselves.

Some loved freedom and got even better. They were the friends who would bunk classes for fun but now they were tired of being questioned by others and wanted to give their lives meaning. They worked. They worked really hard. They became better, they were the backbenchers but with full freedom, they were doing their own thing and were getting successful at it.

Let's talk about the other freedom, that CS offers i.e. it offers the freedom to work from anywhere you want, make anything you want and learn anything you like.

2 - Help.

It's easy in an open university environment to get help. You can literally go to the office of any doc. Ask for help and advice. Lots of people but to take advantage of this you have to be social. Some people want to talk about something but they don't. This hurts them sometimes, it is better at other times because only because someone has a Ph.D. in computer science doesn't mean they would always give good advice.

My experience? I got help from a Prof. about my career. he saved my life, I'd say.

3 - Life.

You learn a lot of things in Uni. You learn how many rats and snakes you've been playing with all the time. You'd learn good things about people you always hated. You'll learn that making judgments based on looks will land you in the mud. You'll learn to not judge anyone. You'll learn how to be social and what are the benefits of being social. My Experience, I once got an A in my paper. My friend got B+, he got jealous, snatched the paper from my hand, went to the prof and complained that mine is no better than his. Prof. got convinced after his 10 minutes of arguing but instead of raising his grades, he lowered mine. Now I got a B+. Not everyone who says Hi to you in Uni. is your friend.

4 - You are less dependent.

You don't depend much on your parents etc. You can make more mistakes, learn from your mistakes. You can make career mistakes which I think is really important because only after spending some time doing what you hate is when you'll realize what you love and once you know what you love, you're on the right path.

Conclusion

You can learn a lot from getting higher education from universities but the question is, do you want to get higher education, or do you want to get skills? Would you be willing to sacrifice your life away believing in the article you read online or do you want to read yourself first and want to see what you want to do? Do you want to keep on studying until you die or do you want to settle? Can you learn to make good choices? What if someone teaches you how to make good choices but you are not someone and your life is your life and instead of following your heart you trusted someone but your heart was right and now the good choices that you learned to make might tear your life apart because those were not your original choices.

My Experience With Django

Mujeeb Ishaque — Fri, 06 Sep 2019 15:30:26 +0000

It's been quite sometime after leaving Laravel. I didn't want to do website development for a short interval of time and in that particular timeframe, I started working with Python.

Motivation

I had a software project and I know C#/WPF, so before starting to code the software, It came to my mind that you're learning Python, wouldn't it be cool if you can complete your software in python too? So I did. Python+PyQt5 and it was easy and helped me learn a couple of more things.

All sorts of questions were answered by the same answer, "Python". You want to work with images, data, machine learning, website development, you can do all of this and more with Python programming language.

Experience

At this point, I'd left laravel and php completely. I was reading the Django official documentation and the words that were captivating to me were, "Rapid Application Development" in the Django documentation. I made my first project of todo app, had to write little code for doing most of the things. Another boost came when I learned about Django's auto admin panel and that boost went away when I realized it's really hard to customize the look and feel of the Django admin. Some people even advised me to prefer making my own admin panel if you need all sorts of customizations. I didn't even realize that not everyone asks for customizations. Most common things like header, site_title and the way you interact with your model in the admin panel, can be modified with fewer lines of code.

Working with forms

man, I'd been creating forms in the templates for so long. Got introduced to ModelForm and oooh boi!. I mean like you literally have a form ready for your model just by like 5 lines of code? And wait, not only that, it does validation too and that too, automatically.

MTV architectural pattern

Easy to learn, nothing hard. It's not completely different from MVC either.

Django messages (alerts)

Got introduced to Django messages framework. Is there anything more easy to work with? yeah, I had trouble memorizing the debug_levels but it's not difficult and certainly doesn't take much time to learn.

Hosting

If you follow the docs correctly, it's a breeze. For Example, I forgot to include the static root in the settings.py, read the docs again and corrected my mistake. Ran the app and that's it.

Conclusion

So far, I've loved Django. Everything is simple, easy to follow but sometimes you'd have to dig deep down to understand how Django do certain things and by then you'd have gained enough experience so you won't stress about it.

Delivering a successful presentation/lecture

Mujeeb Ishaque — Mon, 20 May 2019 00:46:12 +0000

There have been times when I've been selected as a group lead to deliver a presentation on certain core concepts/technologies take Machine learning, cloud computing as an example. Never failed to nail them but I always end up with the feeling that it could have been better, I should have involved the audience, I should have taken less time, I should have presented an example for better understanding and I should have done this and that. Now, I am getting good and I've dealt with most of the issues that I thought I had.

In this write-up, I'd open up my todos/advice before delivering a presentation or a lecture in front of an audience consisting of more than 40 people. I'd also like to ask the readers to suggest me their todos/advice in the comments.
First things first there are several things that are compulsory/crucial regardless of the nature of the talk/lecture/presentation.

0 - Dress Up! (lightning should strike every time you move).
1 - Don't do "hmmmmmmmm", "Ahhhhhhhhhhh", "Yeaaaaaahhhh".
2 - For some reason, I've noticed when I use the word, "maybe", people kind of lose interest? This word doesn't have that confidence/vibe. For some people, they want to hear facts, they are not there to listen to a guy who "maybe" knows what he is talking about.
3 - Your voice really matters. I've called my friend a few times to learn Calculus from him, he's good at math. I tend to lose interest when he's talking (same boring tone). However, while in University, I met this another dude who had a really natural mature masculine voice and I never lost focus, more likely, he never lets the audience lose focus.
4 - Examples, experiences, stories. Please share them!

Let's get to the real things, the technicals. The things that you as an engineer should do or follow.

1 - Clarify the fundamentals by providing easy examples.
2 - Don't just move slides, do something. For Example, if you're talking about machine learning, run a demonstration right in front of the audience - but always find a logical reason, in case it doesn't work(these things happen, you might have run your code a million times but in front of a large audience, the code just doesn't work sometimes). Idk, happened to me. So, Always have a reason like, "internet's slow in this place, the code requires a file to be downloaded from this and that and so on." OR, "this isn't my computer, this computer needs to get updated or the code isn't tested". Trust me, you'll know the reason. The important thing is not to be thrown off by the mistakes. Stand your ground, people make mistakes, don't worry, don't try to just move ahead. Tell the people what the issue is and they will understand. For the general public, only do demonstrations that you're 100% sure will work.
3 - Tell a story. Example, "People! You can really earn a lot of money from machine learning with python doing freelance work. I had a client from the UK, she wanted to detect a certain object from the live camera feed, I trained Yolo with a custom dataset and implemented all the things she needed. She was really impressed and gave me $150 tip."
4 - Know how to wind up.
5 - Practice it, a night before the actual presentation/lecture.

These are the things that I can think of right now, I might be updating this article after criticism. Please take some time to improve it, suggest better things, appreciate it, share it, comment on it, ask for anything. I hope that it helps you.