Want to ace developer interview?

Here is my number one biggest tip for making the best impressions to employers and interviewers, using the amazing @digitalocean as a practical example:

👇👇👇

⚡️ Pay attention to the company values. Visit the company site, write down their values, focus on them through out the interview process.

Practical Guide:

Want to work at @digitalocean ? Here's how to prepare for the interview based on their

1. 🚀 Community. Compile a list of all your community contributions, open source work, conferences and meetups you've attended or organised, and make sure you sing these out during the interview. Capitalise on your passion for the community.

2. 🎉 Simplicity. Take a look at their competitors, analyse how Digital Ocean is different. During the interview, topics will come up talking about caring about the customer to make things stupid simple. Participate by mentioning how Digital Ocean is doing this everyday

3. 🪜 Transparent environment. Understand what this means, and think about the benefits of having such a core value. Go ahead to look at your career and see how changing to such a model will be beneficial. Be able to express why this model would make you a better engineer.

I’m 18, currently working on my own startup (TBA)

To all the founders out there...

What “startup advice” would you give yourself at 18?

The stuff nobody tells you

8 things startups can do early on to optimize for focus & productivity:

1. Synchronous meetings only for p0 and p1 items

All meetings should be 25 minutes by default with the ability to extend by 15 minutes if necessary.

Each meeting should have a clear agenda that outlines its context, asks, action items, etc.

Meetings should be brief & impactful

2. Asynchronous for everything else

- Stand ups
- Project demos / updates
- Design / Eng handoffs
- Documentation walkthrough

A simple flowchart for meetings:

3. Strive for 90% focused work / 10% meeting & sync time

- No meetings on Tues & Thurs
- Encourage turning off Slack & distracting notifications
- Track your time to better understand your distractions
- Buy your team a copy of Deep Work & Getting Things Done

4. No recurring meetings

Recurring meetings are a productivity killer. Try to avoid them when possible.

Instead, assess whether a follow-up meeting is needed at the end of each meeting.