Posted over at my current company's blog (current company for two more weeks):  Impressions of speaking at the FlixTech Summit . In this post I talk about how I prepared for my first-ever tech conference talk, and how it all felt.

Finally the video of my conference talk has been posted on YouTube ! Enjoy, I welcome comments...

(I gave this talk at the FlixTech Summit convention in late June, here's my attempt to transcribe it. The video should be posted to YouTube soon, when it is I'll link to it. Here are my slides .) Technical interviews are one of the most important and difficult things we do, yet often there's a haphazard approach to conducting them, with predictable uneven results. A few numbers from the Net: Only 25% of technical interviewees are consistent in their performance.  -   interviewing.io Strong performers mess up technical interviews 22% of the time.  -   interviewing.io Most interviews can only explain 14% of an employee's performance  -   Wired   Obviously we need to improve our technical interviewing! Interview Goals The technical interview is one step in the process that usually starts with a CV entering our recruiting pipeline, and hopefully ends with an excellent new team member being hired. It's probably the most important step in this process:

Anja's Voice Teaching Page Anja has had a voice teaching page for quite a while. Recently I updated the layout, redid the Google Maps integration, and a few other things. Please check out her page at the link above, and I'd welcome any feedback. I also welcome any backlinks from your own sites.

Most of my readers are probably firmly in the Microsoft Windows world when it comes to using a computer. What is Microsoft (MS) Windows (in any one of its many incarnations, whose most common and recent members are Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7)? It's the operating system (OS) of the computer - for most people computers aren't very usable without an operating system. The operating system sits on top of the hardware and provides the complete logic for everything you see when running a computer - it connects to and registers various hardware devices while booting, like graphics card, sound card, mouse and monitor, and provides functions like user management, a graphical user interface (GUI), process management, and much more. The operating system does not include things like web browsers, mail programs or office suite programs (yes, there are alternatives to MS Office, see OpenOffice ). There are many other operating systems, some with restricted niche usage ( RISC

Two Weeks of Kindling I've now had my Kindle for nearly two weeks, and it's time to share some of my impressions with you. After unpacking it I immediately charged it up and synched it with my Amazon account. Actually it was already synched - Amazon preconfigures them. I connected it pretty easily to my home WiFi network (I have a prodigiously long, difficult password). I downloaded some new books and some old books. In a short period of time my Kindle was playing host to: Shakespeare's collected works Trollope's collected works Gulliver's Travels Pride and Prejudice Effective Java What Technology Wants ...and a few samples of other books. Thanks to Amazon's E-Ink technology the text is wonderfully easy to read, even in fairly dim light. This presbyopic reader is happy that the text size and spacing can be quickly changed, allowing me to adapt for reading with or without glasses. The Kindle always remembers the farthest point I've read to in e