At first I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of topics and learning opportunities. From free videos on YouTube with varying quality to paid courses offering a thoughtful curriculum. Out of the many structured and well-designed learning paths towards coding interviews I had to choose one or two. The secret was to follow one or maybe two of them and not waste time jumping back and forth between tens of different curricula. Sometimes it is better to trust that the author put some serious thought into compiling a suitable learning path.

According to staff.com Google receives 2 million applications per year. An average year has about 260 working days. That leaves us with over 7500 applications per day. Getting and maintaining recruiter attention is crucial to make it through to the next stage.

Overwhelmed with the sheer amount of books, articles, and papers to read, a myriad of talks and videos to watch, and an ever-increasing number of things to learn I almost gave up. I was frustrated by the chaos that I have created out of open tabs, bookmarks, handwritten notes, and stacks of books on my desk. Instead of motivating and inspiring me the massive amount of available data had a chilling effect on me. It was time for reflection!

As a young child I experienced the last years of the cold war and later the fall of the Berlin wall. Part of my childhood was the possibility of a nuclear conflict. For example, my parent’s house had a shelter in the basement that could be locked down by thick, metal window blinds and an even thicker and heavier door. Conveniently, we used the room for storing food. Only later I realized that there was a reason that all food with a long shelf life was stored in that room. Not that any of this would have made a difference in case of an actual nuclear war. However, a tiny interest in nuclear catastrophes remained…

Phew! Day three comes to an end here in Singapore! It’s Friday evening which means the weekend is about to start. 🎉 Sorry European and American folks, you have a few more hours to go.

We had a generous dinner reception last night with highly attentive staff. That may have lead to one or the other SRE exceeding their own SLO for beverages. At least that was my impression when I look at the tail latency for showing up for the first talks of the day. 🤨 Anyway, let’s sum up what’s been hot today!