Cracking the Coding Interview, 6th Edition: 189 Programming Questions and Solutions

June 27, 2017 by Leave a Comment

By Gayle Laakmann McDowell published by CareerCup

This looks like a really useful book for new developers attending job interviews. I think it’s also useful if you are responsible for recruiting and interviewing developers.  I wouldn’t suggest using any of the examples given in this book in an actual interview for obvious reasons but having seen the style you can create your own similar questions.  In my experience if you do this then it’s essential to test the questions on a few of your existing developers to benchmark the questions and see what good looks like.

Cracking the Coding Interview, 6th Edition: 189 Programming Questions and Solutions
At £25.36 it looks expensive but if it helps you get a top developer job or recruit a good developer instead of an average developer it will pay back within minutes.
My interview advice for those attending and running interviews is always to relax and try and enjoy the experience. It’s a chance to learn about other people and other companies and learn from their experience even if you are initially unsuccessful.
If you have any great example Developer Interview questions or you’ve been asked a tough question that you are not sure of the answer to leave it in a comment below and I’ll try and give you some feedback on it.

Click here to view this on Amazon.co.uk
Price: £25.36

Filed Under: Books, IT Management Tagged With: , , ,

Apple iCloud KeyChain Web Developers Best Practice Guide

March 18, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Apple’s password manager (iCloud KeyChain for Safari) may not be the best password manager but that’s completely irrelevant because by now it’s already the most popular, most widely adopted password manager in the World. It’s therefore important that you make sure your website is compatible with this piece of Apple technology. As a user of Apple’s Safari I’m increasingly shocked at the number of major websites that are not compatible with the Apple password manager.

Testing that your site works with Apples iCloud password manager will improve your User Experience (UX) and also improves your sites security.  In my experience people are much more likely to use a strong password if Safari picks the password for them.  In addition to this Safari generates a random strong password for each site, so the chances of a hack on one site being used to gain access to another are greatly reduced.

The key points to making your site compatible are:

  1. Make sure that testing your site against the Safari password manager is incorporated into your user acceptance test plans from now on.
  2. Make sure that testing includes your password change page and password recovery pages. Specifically make sure that when your user picks a new password that this gets saved away properly by Safari and is used next time they need to logon.
  3. Make sure that your site can accept the long complex passwords generated by Safari – currently 15 long containing upper and lower case and dashes.  For example:

    Apple Safari Web designers and developers password manager guidelines.
    The most frequent issue we encounter is that sites don’t allow the hyphen in passwords.

  4. Make sure that your website does not undermine this great security by then emailing out this strong password to the user/customer as part of their registration confirmation.
  5. Make sure that your website does not store passwords as clear text in its database. It should be using a one way hashing algorithm so that the password itself can never be retrieved.

If you discover any hints or tips for making your website work really well with Apple’s Safari / iCloud KeyChain password manager do please get in touch and leave a comment below.  We’ll be sure to update this blog post as we discover more about it.

Filed Under: Apple Mac OS X, iPad, iPhone, IT Security, Web Development Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,