version 1 is how it's usually done, basically every icon library works like this. Using :before isn't a hack, it's supported on ie8+. You can set the span to relative positioning and then give the before content absolute positioning and then have complete control over its placement.

I have a guess, but who knows.

It is. And commonly used. But Java, like so much of Java, is just very verbose and seems to require a ton of plumbing to get stuff done. Frameworks in Ruby/Python (others I'm sure) just seem to do a much better job at using 'magic' properly. I can get a controller up and running doing basically what I want with very little effort. If I want to customize something its easy to do. And so on.

I dunno, I found the Java server faces stuff pretty intuitive and easy to use, but we weren't doing anything super complicated. I get what you mean. Like, we had an assignment where we needed to create a xml doc using java code, and it's absurd. You need to use 5 or 6 classes just to get to the point where you can even make the thing, then another 2 classes to serialize it.

Maybe if I am bored this summer i'll try to crack into RoR. I asked my proff for a good beginner networking book that I could read during my downtime.

My final is this Wednesday and with 100% in the class, all I have to do is get a 50% to get an A in the class. I wonder if it's going to be this easy for the rest of the community college classes.

Oh man that sentence...compared to our system. Just crazy how differently stuff can work.
gl, still aim for 100% ldo

jmakinmecrzy your CC seems to go out of their way to cover the wrong stuff. The Java stuff was pretty irrelevant and ARM clearly > MIPS these days. I guess it's just a typical case of teachers being too lazy to update their courses lol
Oh well, make the best of it. Get one of the cool MIPS boards and fiddle with it or get/write some MIPS reverse engineering/disassemble/hackme stuff

Cool, thx. Guess I'll investigate a bit further than. Escape code stuff always feels strange to me. Can't really say why or that it's warranted

clowntable,

I don't know what any of that means

I asked my professor for a good web development beginner's book and he recommended Marty Hall's book on it, but I looked at it and it's pretty much just stuff we learned in class, with a JSF 2.2 tutorial. I'll go through it but I was looking for something a little more advanced/challenging.

It was someone else that was talking about MIPS.

One thing people sometimes miss is that school often isn't about teaching a particular language/technology that is currently being used out in the real world. It's often more about teaching concepts/theory and using languages/technologies to reinforce/demonstrate those concepts/theory.

With that in mind, I remember MIPS being relatively simple and easy to use - which is nice when teaching. That was a long time ago, and I know little to nothing about ARM, but it wouldn't surprise me if there are still lots of advantages to using MIPS for courses.

I forgot to mention that the final is 100% multiple choice lol.

How good an interview question do you think "create a 3 column layout from scratch" (+use HTML5 tags) would be for any dev job that works on some web app (even backend)? I feel like any candidate that would struggle a lot with this probably isn't a "web first" kind of person if that makes sense.

I think it may actually be pretty good if you can guide them through detail issues. You could also provide some premade stuff (boilerplate CSS/HTML file up to a certain level etc.)

Even if you do something else, any set of general webdev questions you like to ask (like I'd maybe ask what a pseudoclass is and how it's used or have them explain ids vs classes or ask how floating works...then some lightweight sql questions...then some JS maybe have them explain the DOM on a very high level...ask them to explain a high level view of an HTTP request or maybe what REST is etc.)

my kingdom for a way to turn off fullscreen transition animations in Mac OSX!!!

I never got in the habit of using those... the semantic markup movement/thing kind of rubs me the wrong way tbh.

Well at least you get to discuss the reasoning behind it and why you may/may not want to use it which is pretty solid for a job interview I think.

The <article> tag kind of tilts me. I rarely need it, would have preferred <content> or something more generic. Still using <div> for most of that.

I do like header, footer, nav and section quite a bit and think they make sense. Particularly like nav around ul etc. for easier styling differentiation between normal lists and navigation lists (obviously could be done with extra divs, classes and ids as well but you get the idea)

I'm probably just turned off by them because when I see them in common wordpress/drupal themes they have 5 classes and id's applied to them anyway so it's just extra useless information ie <header id='post-3-header' class='special-header page-article-post post-page front-page article-list'> or whatever crap.

I can see how it could be used nicely though. My mind just goes to 'what should I name this class' instead of 'what type of tag should I use here and does it need a class'. But maybe I'll try working it in next time I'm working with html.

You have updates!!!!

IMO chances are very remote that you'll have someone answer both mildly deep CSS and SQL questions satisfactory. Most of the backend people I've met haven't the slightest idea what a pseudoclass is or how floats work.

what do you mean? my system is up to date, are you saying there is a way to do this?

FULL STACK baby!

(I had to google pseudo-class but I totally know what those thingies are. :P)

no no, mac os complaint is all

.

So, my job has been looking for someone who can do some SQL. I'm not looking for someone who is super expert at SQL, though I'm obviously looking for someone with some useful knowledge. Before bringing anyone in for an interview, I ask a series of questions ranging from stupid-easy to the top level of my knowledge to see where they may be in the continuum.

Easy stuff is like "name the joins you know." Pretty much everyone gets this one though no one never mentions a Cartesian product, which is fine, I guess.

What does a full join return from a left table that is not in the right table? No one gets this one.

What are some common data types? This is where people start falling apart. They all get varchar, char, maybe date, and then... "uh... number, I think?"

Constraints. I'm surprised that almost everyone gets this one except no one mentioned check constraints. Too easy, I guess.

What is an index. Only one person knew. I followed up by asking what kind of indices there are, and they knew a few of them, which was pretty wicked. I then asked how often one should update and index and they wiffed that one.

Trigger. Most people don't know, though one guessed and then I asked why triggers are often eschewed. Gave an impressive answer. Invited for an interview from the incredible ability to logic that one out alone.

But the one thing no one gets, and this shocks me to no end since more than one has had job amounting to years working on production databases: What is a transaction?

Seriously? I would have though any job would have required transaction knowledge on day three at the latest.

So, one person did good on the questions (common theme: no one knows much about actually building a database, which is okay.) and I invited him in. I gave him the softball fizz-buzz stuff then moved into a query that required group by, which he nailed.

The next question was the same damn query except it would need a having statement. He got stuck, which is okay. I told him he is able to use his favorite search engine. Query one was a dead-end. Query two, dead end. He started panicking and writing in all sorts of crazy stuff into the query. This continued for a whopping 15 minutes before I told him to hang that one up and he finally succumbed after me saying it n times. Hell, I would have taken a sub-select as an answer. I wouldn't be happy with it, but I'd at least see he can solve a problem he doesn't know the answer to.

If anything, this makes me consider applying for database jobs. The bar seems pretty low.

Are these applicants people that have a CS degree? We learned how to do all of that, as well as normalization, concurrency, etc.

Yeah, and did they flat out not know anything about stuff like triggers, or did you just overnit their wording on responses? I know quite a few CS interviewers that do that

No, I'm super easy on them. They generally flat-out say "I don't know." I'm not looking for a whiz as I don't expect the company to pay super well and I don't really want someone who is only wants to work with databases since they will quit within 2 weeks.

Yes, a few of them have CS degrees, though I wouldn't fault them for not knowing this stuff from school. There are some that have Oracle N+xyz certs and don't know anything. One was in a class called "Advanced Databases" and didn't get a single answer correct.

As for normalization... that's one of those things that looks super easy with the simple stuff you'd learn in class but is incredibly difficult to get right. If someone said they know how normalization works, I'd be rather skeptical.

Random: Did anybody here have a SBCGlobal email account? I believe ATT bought them a while ago and I have no idea if the emails were forwarded or are still valid. I ask because I have a DB of these emails for a project and want to know if we should strip them out or not.

Hopefully one of you had one and can help me! Getting into contact with ATT people is tough.