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How I Turned A Tech Interview Question Into A Medium Article That’s Earning Me Money
Thinking of ideas for technical articles can be difficult. I often feel that for every interesting topic there is already a ton of great articles, and there’s really nothing valuable that I can add to the subject. Great ideas sometimes have to come from completely unexpected sources- like coding interviews.
Several months ago, I was approached by a recruiter on LinkedIn about a company that was looking for a developer, and the requirements really matched my profile wonderfully. The project seemed very interesting, the salary was quite a steep increase to what I was earning at the time, and so I thought- why not give it a shot.
The technical part of the interview was a take home task. I prefer those a lot more to live coding tasks because:
- They usually resemble real life tickets you would get on the job ( as we all know, you will never get a JIRA ticket that requires you to invert a binary tree)
- The pressure is much lower, since you usually have 2–3 days to finish, and no one is actually watching you write the code ( and copy/paste from Stack Overflow)
The task required me to create an application that will connect to a live stream of tweets, and extract 3 real-time metrics from the stream:
