04 10 / 2010
Rock-solid Fundamentals
Over the weekend, I saw The Social Network and read this article, The Social Network Bust: What I learned from my job interview with Facebook, from Hacker News. The impact on me was the importance of ‘rock-solid fundamentals.’
The last few months were frustrating, rewarding, and even community building. With other readers, I learned the basics of Django, GAE, and now have the ability to patch together websites. However in the mad dash to learn ASAP, I did not build a solid comp sci foundation.
Like anything in life, if it is worth doing, it’s worth doing right. I have learned how to code, but when my roommate asked me, “So you can define a class?” I couldn’t. I know that there is a class within my models & views files, but I can’t answer why.
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After some pleasantries the discussion of technology started and of course a few questions here and there. What is load exactly? What does it mean? Discussions on threads and processes. How can two processes communicate with one another? What I slowly understood while I was talking with Tom Cook was that this was not a discussion on scalability on a macro scale, however it was it was discussion of scalability on a micro-scale. I was not prepared for some of these questions, since some of these questions were Computer Science fundamental.
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Those few sentences from the Facebook interview piece resonated with me. In TheSocialNetwork, guys were hacking away like coding Ferraris- while taking shots. To become an engineer at Facebook or Google, you MUST know the basics, they understand the why. That is what I need, and what I recommend to other readers.
Gain the fundamentals to understand why.
Resources:
MIT OpenCourseWare: Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
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