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\font\twelverm=ptmr7t at 12pt
\twelverm
\baselineskip=24pt
\nopagenumbers
\headline={\hfil Rohrer \number\pageno}
{\obeylines
Holden Rohrer
Ms Rosner
Hire Me
1 Apr 2021}
% Describe how you are preparing for your interview. Consider several
% questions you would ask your new supervisor and write them out. (If
% you have already started, please describe what happened in your
% interview. What questions were you able to ask and what were the
% answers?)
\centerline{Journal Prompt \#1: Interview Questions}
During my interviews, I spoke with Mr.~Phil Muldoon and Mr.~Jeremy
Duvall over the phone.
Both went well and I learned more about the 7Factor company from them.
I asked them questions about the processes 7Factor uses to develop
software and what I'd be working on in the two interviews.
My interview with Mr.~Muldoon, the HR point of contact, mostly covered
some basic details about the internship and setting up a second
interview wih Jeremy, although the second interview did still take a
significant amount of back-and-forth over email to set up (the schedules
misaligned, and the time didn't get fully communicated to Jeremy, me,
and Ms.~Hall at the same time).
The basic information covered in my intervew was about how long the
interview would be (until the end of the school year) and other
questions.
He also told me that I'd be working on the WellEntry project with people
who work at 7Factor and repeated some of the marketing pitch of the
company.
7Factor is a company that's focused on modern development practices and
creating good products.
One of the questions I asked Jeremy was ``what development process does
7Factor use?/What is kanban?'' (I only learned these two questions had
the same answer after I had asked them both).
Kanban is a method of software development where the sales team or other
programmers will find work that needs to be done (like refactoring a
program to be easier to work on, or creating a new feature for a
client), and post it on a public ``billboard'' or ``signboard'' like
Trello (7Factor uses Clubhouse) where anybody can start working on a
``story.''
A story is the name for a small, well-divided task that a team member
can start working on, mostly independently from other developers until
the time for revisions or code reviews come.
Code review is part of the 7Factor process in order to ensure
good-quality code across the board.
One of the guiding principles of the company is ``kaizen,'' or
continuous improvement.
I got a chance to ask Jeremy about this principle, and constructive
(keyword) criticism's one of the guiding principles.
So that 7Factor can build good code, people need to understand where
they're able to improve, and where projects are able to get better,
candidly, but very much still kindly.
Another question I asked Jeremy about was the typical tech stack on a
project and what I'd be working on.
WellEntry is all-JavaScript, which is becoming more and more common, so
it's an interesting set of tools to work with.
The front-end is written in Vue, one of the older frameworks with
full support for reactivity and a lot of helpful tooling above the bare
metal.
The back-end is written with ActionHero to manage requests from users as
independently threaded programs, and Sequelize to interface with the
database backend for storing data (users, users' roles, vaccination
records, surveys or COVID tests, etc).
This means that a lot of the skills from this project will be
transferable in the future.
More generally, 7Factor deals with a lot of different tech stacks and
languages, often working with companies to upgrade old stacks to more
modern ones that are easier to work on.
This means that you'd probably see JS a lot, but also Python, Java, C\#,
and others.
And, since 7Factor uses Infrastructure-as-Code techniques with putting
nearly every project on a repeatable CI/CD pipeline and cloud
deployment, the Terraform-specific configuration files near every
project.
\bye
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