The big interview day, interim skill sharpening

posted by Jeff | Saturday, September 12, 2009, 12:58 AM | comments: 0

The big Microsoft interview day (second attempt) is coming in about two and a half weeks. Just waiting at this point to find out which planes they'll stick me on. Hopefully it'll involve a hybrid car instead of a boat this time. :) Looks like my first interview is with the guy who did the first phone screen, which is cool because I feel like I really hit it off with him. He definitely pushed me in the right way, and I feel like I responded well.

Meanwhile, I need to jump in and get engaged in some stuff. My brain has been a little soggy lately because I haven't been using it much for programming. I have a specific set of goals in mind, and with new stuff that will require some prototyping and practice. I'd say it's about half-relevant for the job as I understand it now. Again, the brain exercise alone will be beneficial.

Last night, while trying to fall asleep, I actually realized that the new site project that I've not worked on in too long was something I loathed because I was just over-thinking it. Not the first time I've done that. Essentially, I was having all kinds of weirdness about the way I was constructing objects and their backing data around photos and DeepZoom photos. I was trying to treat them as very similar and building this really silly object model around it with disparate tables and interfaces and factories. It was kinda stupid, because it assumed there'd be a hundred other variants on photos, which of course there's not. The solution was just to put a bit on the photo record indicating if there was DZ data available. Boom. If the UI encounters it and has to care, it loads that extra data. I don't know why I was trying to service problems that don't exist today and likely never will.

I coded myself into a box like that because I was originally thinking about a tagging system that could largely be applied to anything. That makes more sense in terms of sucking out various objects of different varieties with one simple and unifying interface member. Oh well, I learned something, and hopefully I can attack that again soon.

The real meat of what I'll get into will likely be some of the finer details of ASP.NET MVC that I understand conceptually but would like to get deeper into with real examples. Lots of good stuff to learn, job score or not.


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