Does anyone offer raspberry pi as a service?

Say I want to be able to test a cluster of raspberry pis, either virtually (preferred) or a place that essentially co-los pis to test stuff on?

I'm kind of in the same situation.. when I graduate, I will have had exactly one job for the last ~12 years, not only in a completely different field (boat captain) but 0 skills overlap I could ever talk about in an interview other than being a good team player and good at managing underlings, and I'll be pushing 30 just hoping to get my foot in the door somewhere. I hope by that time to have a project under my belt and maybe an internship, that's what I'm holding out hope for. I'm amazed at how little I know about anything as far as I am in my education.

But, my expectations are pretty low. If i can land a job as a jr. software dev making ~50k a year within a year or two of graduation I'll be crazy happy. that's the bar i've set and it's pretty high for me. anything less than that i'd probably settle for because captaining doesn't make much and my lifestyle is getting more expensive by the day.

unfortunately for me it's all about numbers, I like creating things and solving problems but I don't really have any passion for this.

Don't undervalue yourself in this market thats for sure.

I have an interesting interview coming up: Scala, GoLang, Python, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, and PostGIS.... From how I understand the stack, most of the system is Scala, but there's heavy use of GoLang and a bit of Python for glue.

They sent me the names of the people that are interviewing me. I looked them up and one is a DBA, the other two are total wild cards as far as I can tell, but I'm guessing they are team leaders with some no-joking backgrounds.

I did download and start playing around with Scala (Emacs has a nice IDE for it, btw). My first impression is that Scala language is really hard to learn.

I have no idea if I'm doing this right. It doesn't hurt to learn a new language, but I'm interesting in giving Cassandra and GoLang a whirl today as well. Not sure if I'm wasting time on that since I can't go into any depth on these topics.

hey that looks like a pretty sweet build. I'm not sure I really have the time to assemble my own but i may pick up something very similar, could be a good project. All the pre-assembled PC's i've seen have 1 or two things I don't like about them

is ~$50k a low valuation for an entry level software job?

This depends on a lot of factors. Where is the job? What flexibilities does it offer? But in general, you should be able to find higher.

Oh I see - I sort of misread your earlier post as being worried about your job search when you're much older and experienced. Not that there aren't common elements to any job search but getting your first gig is going to have challenges that you won't see in my job search but at the same time, there are simply more positions available at the junior level than where I'm looking, etc. You're unlikely to deal with subtle ageism and "that guy is expensive but not as good as us" attitudes. So I would definitely not expect everything to be easy but you should definitely not be worried on account of my struggles.

You also have some time and know that you'd be looking for a job in the future and that should also allow you to prevent some of the mistakes I made. If I knew a year ago that I'd be looking for a job now, things would have gone very differently - part of my problem was that I went from not looking at all to active search, which means I didn't have any soft leads from going to meetups and conferences or even talking to past colleagues and head-hunters.

Also since you're coming out of school and still fairly young, I would try to let them assume that you're about as old as other graduates.

Yes but not turning it on does break one thing guaranteed. Security.

yea it's just stressful being my age (I know it's young but I will still be an old graduate), coming from a different field and also knowing nothing about anything. Luckily I look a lot younger than i am, hopefully that holds true at 30. I am always very conscious of my age though when I'm at school.

as an aside the last type I touched android stuff was when eclipse was the main IDE for it, android studio is so so so much better it's blowing my mind.

I was once at an underground art club in France where they somehow overlayed all of Mozart's works. It was pretty awesome.

So I have a fever and a phone screen tomorrow. Would it be ok to reschedule or would they think I am not committed or something?

I'd write a letter more or less like this:

Hi,

Just want to let you know I am excited to be interviewing with you. Unfortunately, I'm running a high fever today and ideally would like to reschedule, so I can perform as well as possible. However, I understand you guys are busy and if you can't reschedule, I'd like to keep the current phone screen time and I'll do my best anyway. But, if rescheduling wouldn't be a big inconvenience for you, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks,
XX

Point of reference I made base of 1.5x that plus another approx. 15% in bonus right out of school last year and that was in the Midwest. I was almost 29 at graduation so also pushing 30. I was able to spin it as a positive.

I will be 34 when I graduate and I have a lot of the same concerns.

Awesome, thanks.

People 30+ who feel old now among younger graduates or coworkers or whatever: be sure to rewatch No Country For Old Men soon. It's not about what you thought it was about when you saw it at 24 (hint: reread the title).


Don't write "guys" and try not to use that word to address a group in general unless they are all guys. Also make this more pithy but yea that's the idea.

This is probably the safer route to take, and might as well follow this advice. That said, "guys," especially on the west coast, is about as common for mixed gender address as "y'all" is in the South: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/guys.

But that said, when I lived in the South, my friends would make fun of me for using "you guys." Had nothing to do with gender politics, though.

Curious about the below interview question. One of my co workers asked a candidate this question and he struggled to find the answer. Wondering how hard of a question this is?

Given an array of length N, which contains integers ranging from 1 to (N -1), write a function that returns the duplicate number in the array using constant memory and without modifying the array.

The array may contain more than one duplicates, in that case, it is okay to return any of the duplicate numbers.

If it makes any difference to the age conversation, I'm 37 and my resume only goes back about 5 years. I've been asked my age many times, usually with an apology "I can't tell if you are 25 or 45," which I've been hearing for the past 15 years. I get ID'd a lot at bars a lot and get strange looks from the bartenders, lol.

In any case, I don't recall ever being directly asked about my age, but I get some questions about what I was doing before the beginning of the resume. One day, I'll just say I was in prison to see how they react.

is the array sorted?

If not, then for each element in the array, assign a variable and check the rest of the array, return var == array[i] is true?

gaming_mouse be like

Pretty sure the JS solution is:

goofy,

that's basically right, but isn't guaranteed to run in constant memory -- eg, if you data has N-1 duplicates of the same thing. To fix that, you can just write a helper function "countWhere" or something that itself uses reduce to return the number of items that equal some specific item.

It's worth pointing out that the running time is n^2, but that wasn't a constraint, and indeed I don't believe it's possible to solve this in constant memory without hitting n^2 running time, since you can't sort the array in constant memory.

speaking of which, i'd love to hear from the node experts here how you are handling the issues raised by this recent debacle. i assume shrinkwrap is part of the solution, but as i understand it there's more too.

suzzer, what say you?

Whether it's a constraint given or not, if you are solving an interview problem, and you present a solution that is not maximally efficient, it's probably not going to be considered the "correct" answer. Most questions have a trivial solution that is much less efficient than the best one.