Zero to Hero Weekly | Issue 4 — Have You Fizzed that Buzz?

Welcome to the fourth issue of Zero to Hero Weekly.

I’ve done a lot of stuff this week, some of which you can find as new articles on Zero to Hero, and some are still brewing and cooking in Zero to Hero Kitchens that will reach you in time.

Hello from the Zero to Hero Kitchens 👩‍🍳

Firstly, I’ve started creating a lot of video content; here’s a quick preview of what’s in the immediate production pipeline. The range varies from setting up a development environment to exporting DynamoDB tables… a lot of quality material is coming your way.

The items that have green indicators next to them are the videos that have already been published. The blue row is the one that I’m currently working on.

There’s a lot coming down the pipeline—for example, in the Setting Up a Development Environment video series, I start with brand new default Mac OS system. There, I step-by-step install and configure my opinionated sets of development tooling, environment, and applications.

FizzBuzz Pro

FizzBuzz Pro is a sister project cooking in the Zero to Hero kitchens, and I think it deserves its own section.

FizzBuzz Pro will be an app to provide you with algorithmic puzzles and tried and tested solutions to those puzzles, along with outlining strategies that you can reuse, and highlighting common patterns that you can exploit.

It’s no secret that companies are asking competitive programming questions in technical interviews. That’s the current norm, rather than the exception.

While I still don’t understand the efficacy of asking algorithmic puzzles in choosing the best candidate (here’s a short 3min video and a longer 30min “uncut” version of it that I’m ranting about the subject matter, in case you are interested), apparently the rest of the industry does not think like me. From startups to big corporations, everyone is drinking the same kool-aid.

Even worse, these algorithmic puzzles do not measure your aptitude as a software engineer, they do not measure your technical acumen. They are robotic—inhuman, even. They are merely benchmarks about how fast you can come up with a solution almost mechanically.

If you cannot change the game rules, then you’ll have to play the game by the rules. But, how?

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