First-Hand Tips to the Interviewee

May 18, 2012 Leave a comment

Through recent discussions with interviewers such as HR managers, Project Managers and Technical Hiring Managers, I’ve compiled a list of first-hand tips to job candidates. I hope they are helpful to you.

From Conversations

 

“[A] stumper for more entry level individuals is the ‘where do you see yourself in 5 years’? Many times (most times) it is ‘manager’. Given that they are probably interviewing with the manager, they should think what the manager wants them to say which is more ‘an expanded role in what I am interviewing for’. This stumps many of the interviewees. Remember, the interview is about the company not about the interviewee.”

Pat Tokarcik – HR Director – ShurTech Brands, LLC

 

“There is one piece of advice to the experienced or inexperienced that I’d pay forward – [get] Gallup’s Strengths Finder & set out some realistic development goals as part of self discovery.

I didn’t think about the book when we discussed ratings the other day, and it’s a pretty important piece of advice that was recommended to me & I’ve been successfully deploying in my ‘self discovery’ phases of life. I wish someone would’ve told me that after college. Nevertheless, interview advice for college grads, especially recent college grads, is to focus on strengths and deploy those for confidence. If you gain confidence through preparation or whatever gets you to that ‘I’m ready’ feeling, then you are going to more easily control your behaviors on the ‘stumping’ questions or even the relatively easy ones. It’s also being comfortable that you don’t know everything and don’t have to, giving the interviewer a chance to draw their own conclusions on that.”

Lacey Strete – Special Projects Analyst – Construction Software Technologies

 

“Bring portfolios of your work if you have it and be prepared to discuss what is included. Interviewers are focused on a variety of your attributes. If I find an entry level candidate who exhibits confidence in their abilities (even if they need to be fine tuned from a technical standpoint), but who also has confidence in their communication skills and can speak to what they have created, I see potential for a future mentor/manager. Candidates who can fill those roles in the future are incredibly valuable.”

Natalie Stuller – HR Manager – WS Packaging Group

 

“I’m reminded of an interview I did a few years ago. I asked a guy about a specific version of a program or application, and his response was something along the lines… ‘I did xxx which is similar in the past, and since it should be the same principles, I could adapt to figure it out. Plus if I have specific issues I can always use Google and figure it out.’

I thought it showed his ability to work outside of the box and solve his own issues, and he turned out to be one of the few people on my team who could.”

Jeff Strempel – Consultant – Accenture

 

Already in the Public Domain

Of course, there are some tips already on the Internet that can be very useful for interviewees.

In this YouTube clip, Jason Calacanis, an entrepreneur, speaks for a minute or so about having candidates self-rank themselves.

 

 

Lastly, this YouTube clip was produced by Toastmasters, an international organization helping members to be better public speakers. Here are 5 key tips to interviewing for a job.

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Don’t Disrespect the Web.Config – Transformations

May 9, 2012 2 Comments

No matter how large of a project you are building nor how many lines of code you maintain, the most important file in your whole solution is likely the web.config file. It potentially contains connection strings, API keys, passwords, etc. If any of this information is incorrect you will likely see many problems in your application. Likewise, if a hacker were able to examine this file, it could mean disaster for your network. It is for these reasons that the web.config file must be treated with the utmost respect.

There are 3 things every public website should be doing with their web.config

  1. Use web.config transforms to keep track of development versus production settings
  2. Encrypt important configuration sections for security
  3. ELMAH – Error Logging Modules and Handlers

Each of the above topics will be covered in a separate post. As for today, we’ll discuss #1. Visual Studio 2010 introduced web.config transforms, which make it dead simple to maintain configuration information for multiple deployment environments.

The scenario:

Imagine the not-so-rare network setup of a website that is deployed on a production server, a test server, and is run locally by developers. In the old days, it was difficult to keep track of all the different environment-specific configuration options. Maybe you set the web.config correctly once for each environment and just never overrode it during a new publish. Maybe you created your own configuration text files that were dynamically linked into the application. Either way you had to spend extra time to solve this seemingly simple problem.

Thank goodness for modern IDEs.

Now it’s extremely easy to setup multiple configuration files in your Visual Studio solution, with these additional benefits:

  • Easy integration into source control
  • Each separate web.config file is tied to a Visual Studio build configuration
  • Easier integration into automated builds and deployments

Since the web.config transformation technology has been around for about 2 years now, I’ll try and introduce a new spin on it by demoing this with the Visual Studio 11 Beta.

How to set it up:

  1. Open your project in Visual Studio 11 Beta. Note: new projects in Visual Studio 2010 and 11 already have multiple config transformation files.
  2. Open the Build menu and navigate to the Build Configuration manager.
  3. Click the Active solution configuration drop down list and select New.
  4. Enter information for your test environmentbuild configurations
  5. Right click on the web.config file and select Add Config Transform. Note: If this option is not available, see this link.web.config transforms
  6. You will now see a web.config for each environment you support (Debug representing the developer’s local environment, Test representing Test, and Release representing production).

    config transform

  7. Next, we introduce the environment specific settings for your web.config files
    1. My web.config files typically have environment-specific information in the appSettings and ConnectionString sections:

    <appSettings>
            <add key=“apiKey“ value=“83ABC029538FED091ACDD”/>
    </appSettings>
    <connectionStrings>

    <add name=“DBConnectionString“ connectionString=“Data Source=DBServer;Initial Catalog=DatabaseName;Persist Security Info=True;User ID=userName;Password=password“ providerName=“System.Data.SqlClient“/>

    </connectionStrings>

    1. Since the above is configured for my development environment, I usually leave my web.Debug.config blank
    2. In the Web.Test.config and the Web.Release.config I replace my appSettings and connectionStrings sections with environment specific values (see this website for detailed information on syntax)

    <configuration xmlns:xdt=“http://schemas.microsoft.com/XML-Document-Transform“>

    <appSettings xdt:Transform=“Replace“>
            <add key=“apiKey“ value=“B153439AB3DE8FF9CA9D0“/>

    </appSettings>
    <connectionStrings xdt:Transform=“Replace“>

    <add
    name=“DBConnectionString“
    connectionString=“Data Source=ProdDBServer;Initial Catalog=ProdDatabaseName;Persist Security Info=True;User ID=userName;Password=password“
    providerName=“System.Data.SqlClient“/>

        </connectionStrings>
    …

  8. Now just choose the build configuration and publish a project. It will automatically merge the correct web.config values based on the selected build configuration.

    asp.net publish

 

Beautiful. Your app has been deployed with the appropriate environment-specific web.config settings. In the next post, we will discuss how to encrypt secure information that is stored in the web.config file.

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