Behind the Scenes - Part4 Ground work

Whenever a candidate comes for an interview, surely he would have prepared a lot on his subject and he would have brushed through the latest happenings. This will give him lot of confidence, indeed he will be more confident. But when the interviewer asks any simple out of box question they will fall flat. Take it from me interviewers always try to make candidates comfortable, they always put simple and straight questions.

Some of them will be very silly. But for candidates they seem out of box questions. Watchout for some questions like:
-> Which version of the tools that you are working on?
(Good Practice: Know more about your tools that you are daily working with)
-> Which version of the software that you are working on?
(Good Practice: Know more about your software that you are daily working with)
-> Some details about the company.
(Good Practice: Go through the company's site before attending the interview)

Monitor any webpage with Page2RSS

We are all aware of the recent buzz that was created by RSS . RSS helps to get the feeds of the favorite/selected sites that gives away the xml/RSS feed (more on RSS). But what if my favorite sites are not publishing any feeds?
Page2RSS is just a perfect solution. Just enter your favorite site which you want to monitor and it will display a meesage as below:
This page is monitored for updates. There are no any changes detected since 02/05/07 06:57:40.
To receive updates for this page in RSS format copy-paste this link into your feed reader. And add the link to your RSS readers and you will start receiving the changes.
or
You can drag and bookmark the link Add to Page2RSS and click on the bookmarked link if you want to monitor the site you are viewing.
This way we can monitor almost every site that we browse across.

Goals - Revise, Revisit, Realize

Everybody will have tasks/aims/goals in their life, be it personal/career/business. I was reading a book Goals written by Brian Tracy which talks about the importance of having goals in one's life and Brian Tracy also site's that making a list of Goals, Revising, Revisiting them often will help in Realizing them. I stumbled upon few sites where you can make you goals/things you wanted to achieve public/private and keep monitoring them. There are many websites that will help you in this way.

43 Things
eLIFELIST

Online Photo Editing Tools

How many time you felt to brighten/edit those photographs of yours taken on your trips/occassion ? You need not have the Photoshop tool to make these minor changes. You read it correctly, there are enough web based tools that will do the similar job of that of your photoshop. Here I am listing down few of such online photo editing tools:
PXN8
Picture2Life
Fauxto
Picnic
Snipshot
Preloadr
Try them out!

Mind Maps -2

Reading through the Mind maps, will ignite anybody. The following are the links with lots of mind maps.

Investigation/Feasibility/Planning

Mind-mapping tools are finding a home in corporate IT
http://tinyurl.com/38xvsa

Using mind mapping software for web research

http://tinyurl.com/35rxlo

Turning systems models into projects
(Related to ORM - Outcome Relationship Model)
http://tinyurl.com/yvqnbk

Funnel timeline: A visual approach to project planning
http://tinyurl.com/27lg4u

Project estimating - Mindmaps are a tool in the armory
http://tinyurl.com/3bbclm

How to use mind mapping software for project management
http://tinyurl.com/dvqoc

Mind Mapping and Project Management
http://tinyurl.com/3x6x9u

Mind maps provide a view for collaboration
http://tinyurl.com/38xvsa

Mind Maps -1

"A Picture is worth than thousand words !" I hope everyone will agree with this fact. This is the fundamental principle that backed our growth, association to things, relations... Let me put this way, You might have noticed in the kindergarden days how the text books, guides and all the tools and material carried more pictures and images than the content. So why not to follow the same way in every thing we do in our daily life/business life?
Mind map is the answer.
A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, and decision making. More...
In the life of a Software Programmer, there are few key things like SDLC of any project and TROUBLESHOOTING skills while coding which he/she should be knowing. Here I am going to link two mind map samples for the above :

• Mind Map on Troubleshooting - Link to Map
  
• Mind Mapping and the SDLC

Believe it or not! We can use this technique of Mind maps in almost anything. Learn Mind maps, use them, enjoy the benefits and see the difference.

Quotiki - Collect your favourite Quotes

Quotations are very much power boosters. I stumbled upon this Quotiki where anybody can publish quotes they know, rate the quotes, tag the quotes and filter the quotes based on the Author, User, Tag(s). Here are some of my favourite quotes.

Behind the Scenes - Part3 Ajax

When I joined the interview panel in selecting PHP developers, I used to get minimum of 5-6 resume a week. In many of the resumes I notice them mentioning Web 2.0 and Ajax in their skill sets. During the interviews, either in person or telephonic they will be trapped by these terms. Many candidates fill up their resume with latest and hot technologies. But when we proceed towards asking any questions, many reply that they just started preparing/playing around with it.
But Ajax is not a technology in itself, it is a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies. The intention was to bring more user respone by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scene, without refreshing entire page for every request that user sentds. I do not want define about this here as many sites/blogs have already done in better ways and with lots of examples. There are many Ajax based applications, many frameworks/toolkits are available. May it be Scriptaculous, Backbase ...
Ajax Solutoire lists down all the Ajax based frameworks, toolkits, applications and many resources. Have a look and feel the user friendliness.

My earlier posts on Interviews:
Behind the Scenes - Part2
Behind the Scenes - Part1

In my previous post I listed many such successful applications.
YUI Ajax feed reader
Webwag
Webtop

Behind the Scenes - Part2

This time I was in the panel where candidates with Java and .NET experience were interviewed. To make the candidate feel more comfortable I was asking them about their project experience and told them to explain us about the projects they handled. A candidate told us that he did his project using ASP.NET and of course the database was SQL. I asked him what queries they used to retrieve data from more than two - three database tables. His answer really amazed me, "he said he uses the data set!". He could not give more information for that question.
The data set is a simple GUI box through which queries will be formed by simply filling up the fields with respective table names with which it makes contact.
I feel this kind of a tool will effectively enhance the productivity but sooner they will make developers dumb. I am not saying NO to such tools, but we should always keep in mind that even such tools also use the basic query form and to get the results. I feel it is good for us to get our basics right first!

Earlier Post: Behind the Scenes - Part1

Google co-op - Customize Google search engine for your site

What is this?
Co-op is a customized Search Engine that is built using Google's core search technology. It prioritizes or restricts search results based on websites and pages that user specify, and which can be tailored to reflect user's point of view or area of expertise.

How does it Work?
User can specify/submit the websites that he wants Google to search (It can be his own blog/website). Once you choose the list of websites Google needs to search in, create it. There will be a piece of code generated that user needs to add in his/her website. This code contains a simple search box and button to search.

Want to see it in action. You can try it out this in the Techsavvy Tips I have given in this page itself on top.

Do not worry about the look and feel of the results shown here, you can actually customize the look and feel of it!

This is very effective and useful as it

• Searches in the specific site. You can replace existing search option in sites.
• Easy to customize the look and feel.
• Can connect to web results too...

Know more about this by learning FAQ's
Register here for the Google to search in your website/blog.