The programming world is relatively split on whether more focus should be placed on code readability versus code complexity. As someone who's been working in the field for the past decade however, I have found code readability to be much more valuable for getting a project out to launch on time and for reducing the stress that can come with working on complex software.

Just recently I was in the process of writing a new blog post on Progressive Web Applications. In the post, I was going to document my conversion to a PWA site. This blog to be exact. And so I did what most developers who are attempting to learn something new would do. I jumped on Google and looked up "Progressive Web App". Lo and behold the first result seemed like the answer I was looking for. "Introduction to Progressive Web Apps". It's a good start.

In 2008, when I first began my professional programming career, I was tasked with working on a relatively high traffic website performing various day to day duties and bug fixes on it. Overall, a very tiring, but a very lesson filled experience. After a few years, I decide to move away from this job in pursuit of bigger and funner things in life, and luckily I had plenty of work to show for it from this past job. Plenty of the websites features were built by yours truly, and as they were public facing sites I had no issues in showing my work.

This question will have a completely different answer depending on who you ask. If you ask a front-end developer, then programming will relate more to JavaScript frameworks and client-side interaction. If you ask a back-end programmer, then you'll hear about database connections, data binding and implementing API's. Ask a data scientist, and you're bound to hear about parsing and traversing datasets with scripts written in languages such as Python or R.

Regardless of the field that you find yourself in, landing your first job is one of the most difficult challenges that you will face in your career. And landing your first programming job will be even more difficult, for a few reasons. But mainly, that we don't really know how to interview for a logic based job just yet. We ask you to solve puzzles, riddles and a few node traversal algorithms and you either know it, or you don't. And hopefully you don't get asked about pointers and memory allocation along the way.

This year we will be releasing our brand new podcast Coder's Block to the general public. This is something that we have attempted to do in the past, however, podcasts are difficult as it turns out. Just getting the right software to handle the recording can be a hassle, not to mention that hearing the sound of your own voice is a trauma inducing event. But this time around, we're approaching it with a bit more knowledge on the overall process and more willing to learn as go go through the process.

Since Google became a verb, it has been no secret that they rely heavily on capturing user data, both to serve you better content and to serve their clients better. The clients that purchase ad space, and thus want their ads to go to the appropriate people online. So in order to do this, they have to capture non-personal (sometimes personal) behavioral data and geological data. And most of the time, the people are okay with it, because we get to use cool things like global Maps, real time navigation and a database of content so large that it would take lifetimes to sort out.

Recently I rediscovered an old project on my hard drive that had some potential to change the world (maybe). It was a year old project that was about 80% done, as is usually the case. and it was abandoned because more than likely it became boring at some point in time. So I decided to try to bring it back and shine some new life into it. At least, I attempted to. Now I'll say this, I have been a programmer for the better part of a decade now. So the coding part itself isn't normally a struggle for me. In fact, it's quite a joyful experience. The issues began as soon as I double-clicked on that launch icon, and what followed inevitably left me putting that project back into its hiding place until it is discovered again in another year.

Interviews in general can be nerve-racking meetings regardless of where your current skill level is at. You can be a junior developer and ace all of your questions, or you can be a senior full-stack developer and have no clue about what you were just asked. But while spontaneous at times, there are a few things that you can do to increase your odds of landing that next job. Or rather, here are few things that you should perhaps avoid.

Learning to code traditionally has been a path reserved for those willing to pursue a degree in the field of Computer Science. At least within the past few decades that has been the case. You can look at many of the greatest scientist and engineers at the beginning of the century and realize that many of them did not have any sort of formal training. Thomas Edison himself was self-taught and Nikola Tesla did not complete his formal education, as many of the latest CEO's and innovators tend to do. But somewhere along the line, we pretty much made it mandatory in order to get a job interview.