Automate your interview schedule process

Jorge A. Glez. Mena — Wed, 20 May 2020 21:45:56 +0000

Problem

Time is one of our most valuable resources. Once a day, hour, or minute has passed it can’t come back, at least until we will have the time machine :) When I’m looking for new opportunities, like now, one of the most time-consuming tasks for me is the process of scheduling interviews. It usually involves a lot of back and forward emails, SMS, or private messages on LinkedIn. Plus, if you’re talking with some recruiters/hiring managers at the same time you could make easily the error to schedule two interviews at the same time or with a very short period of time between them, not the best impression that you want to give of your organization skills. If you think your time is valuable, the time of the people interacting with you is valuable too. Could we make this process less time-consuming, less prone to errors, and misunderstood?

Solution

Fortunately for us exists already a good number of services that solve this problem very efficiently. I personally use Calendly, but there are many others that offer more or less the same capabilities. With an app like Calendly, that takes care of scheduling your meetings, you can regain control of your time and dedicate it to learn new technologies/languages, polish your skills in algorithm and data structures, networking, etc. The functioning is very simple, you define the blocks of time you will dedicate to interviews. You have total flexibility over these blocks, as you can see in the following image:

Then you share your calendar with the people interested in it and everyone saves time. After a person book a meeting, Calendly will send the invitation email to all the assistants to the meeting with all the details of it. Besides that, Calendly creates an event in your calendar as well. It’s a win/win! It requires a bit of initial effort, but the payoff is worthy.

Extra mile

I personally use Trello to manage my tasks. Every time that Calendly created an event in my Google Calendar, I created manually a Trello Card, hmmm, not the most fun thing to do. Then I decided to create a script to do these tasks for me automatically, but before starting I decided to change my approach, and instead of reinventing the wheel, see if some service could do that for me. Once again this is a problem that others have had in the past, and they have solved it already. Exist services like ITFFF (I really like that name) and Zapier. I didn’t have experience with any of them, then I flipped a coin, and the winner was ITFFF. It was really easy and magic to see how with any line of code I could connect Google Calendar and Trello, and now every time a person book a meeting with me I see almost immediately the new card on my Trello’s board!

References

This article first appeared on WebCu's blog at https://webcu.dev/automate-your-interview-planning-process/.

TDD vs Procrastination

Jorge A. Glez. Mena — Mon, 11 May 2020 21:02:32 +0000

"This post was originally posted on https://webcu.dev.”

TDD is a software development process that offers two main benefits:

Self Testing Code
It helps us separate interface from implementation.

One of the main benefits that I see about testing, in general, is that a well-tested code base, give confidence to the developers making changes to the software. However, TDD like any other technique or methodology is not a silver bullet. It is not always possible to implement TDD or desirable. Like almost everything in Software Development and life, it is a trade-off and it depends on each situation. Only experimenting, compiling the data, and analyzing it, could we determine what works better for us. I found really interesting these links about TDD and testing:

Procrastination is a very common problem and even more in these times of pandemic. With a high rate of unemployment, it’s more important than ever to get a good preparation for the interviews. One important part of the interview preparation like Software Engineer is to refresh/update our abilities to solve interview questions related to algorithms and data structures. If you don't use trees, graphs, and similar, too often, it could be kind of difficult to get in the mood to tackle these problems.

Sometimes I look for an exercise, I check the description, it seems not so difficult to me, but there are too many edge cases to handle, then I let it for tomorrow, tomorrow becomes next week, next week becomes next month and so on. Recently I was going down this rabbit hole but I decided to change my approach and I used TDD to solve it. I started writing a test. I
didn't solve the exercise at that moment, but I gained momentum and I was able to complete it the same day, not next week or next month. What about if you don't feel like writing test? Just start with one, the most simple that you can. After I found the 2-Minutes Rule by James Clear, I’m trying to apply it every time I feel I’m procrastinating. We need to make the habit as easy
as possible to stick with it. If our goal, is to write tests, we should start just with one. Next time the same thing, until the habit will stick with us.

OK, fine, but what about if you don't feel even in the mood to write a single test? Design your environment in a way that the tests will be your default. In my case I use Exercism, but there are plenty of platforms out there that can help us with this task. They provide the exercises already with a set of predefined tests and we just need to create the implementation to turn them green :).

Do you have other techniques to beat procrastination while preparing yourself for your next job opportunity? What are for you the most difficult aspects of preparing for an interview?

DEV Community: Jorge A. Glez. Mena

Automate your interview schedule process

Problem

Solution

Extra mile

References

TDD vs Procrastination

References