“Tragically, in the knockout stage, the English were hammered 4-1 by Germany. It was painful to watch.”

Syazwan Hakim shares his take on the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Syazwan is the Biggest Football Fan at Stampede.

The FIFA World Cup, arguably the most globally-celebrated event on this planet, had begun in South Africa on June 11, 2010 and will end this coming July 11. It is an event worth 4-years of wait. Only this time, it is chocked-full of shocking outcomes.

Since the very first game till last night’s semi-final (at time of writing), the event is marred by surprises and controversies. Big talents in football didn’t play half as good as they did in club level. Names such as Christiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messy, Wayne Rooney, Frank Lampard and Kaka are well known across the globe. But their appearance on the field is simply disappointing compared to their colourful club track record.

What Happened to the Superstars?

Christiano Ronaldo, the most valuable footballer on Earth – he’s worth €94 million euros – only scored one goal in 2010 World Cup. And it only happened during the Portuguese 7-nil rampage against Korea DPR. It’s almost like wearing the captain armband wasn’t motivation enough to play well for one’s own country. It was a totally different Ronaldo, a far-flung from the Real Madrid star with plenty of skills, trick and astoundingly fast acceleration. For the most expensive player in the world, South Africa didn’t see much from him.

Same goes to Lionel Messi, winner of the Best Player of The Year award. Nobody expected a footballer like him, with 34 goals for Barcelona under his belt, to not even score one goal for Argentina in this World Cup. As predicted, the opposing team’s defense marked Messi so tight that he couldn’t formulate a goal. But that’s a given – if you don’t keep Messi on a leash, he will demolish your team.

The Favourites’ Early Flight Home

Favourite teams such as England, France, Brazil, and Argentina, coming to South Africa expecting to be crowned as the World Cup Champion are just too weak. I can say that France is the worst team in 2010 World Cup. Contrary to the glorious era of Zidane, The French started with such poor performance. They only managed to get a 0-0 draw against Uruguay, then lost 0-2 to Mexico before ending their World Cup campaign by losing 1-2 to South Africa. They also sent home Nicholas Anelka just after tournament day 9 because of some spats between him and the head coach, Raymond Domenech. It gets worse after that. The remaining French squad protested by not attending their training. As the result of the protest, their skipper, Patrice Evra was ultimately dropped from the last game against South Africa and his armband was stripped.

Another favourite team everyone thought has the goods was England. Unfortunately, the star-studded English team was just lucky to survive in Group Stage. Poor performance by Capello’s lads nearly cost them an early exit, but with draw against USA and Algeria and a lucky goal by Jermain Defoe against Slovenia, they earned a sad place into the next round. Tragically, in the knockout stage, they were hammered 4-1 by Germany. It was painful to watch.

Germany once again displayed their real capabilities by showing the way out to Argentina in the most humiliating way, beating the Argentine 4-nil. Excellent performance by Thomas Müller and Mesut Ozil made it terribly difficult for Argentina defense system the entire match. Losing only once to Serbia during group stage,the Germans are now the favourite team to win this World Cup. Up to this moment, they have already scored 13 goals. That’s enough to show how deadly their attack form can get.

The Ghanaian

One team that caught my attention was Ghana. No one expected them to advance from group stage, let alone quarter-final. They nearly made it to semi-final, but Uruguay striker, Luis Suarez denied their chance with a game-saving handball few minutes before the game expired. Suarez was red-carded and penalty given to Ghana. It was an extremely bad luck for their penalty taker, Asamoah Gyan, who only managed to hit the crossbar despite scoring twice from the same spot. The game ended with 1-1 and extended to penalty shootout. Uruguay won 4-2.

Referees

Like any other football tournaments around the world, the World Cup is not free from judging controversies. The most famous controversy involving referees happened in England’s game against Germany. Referee Jorge Larrionda denied Frank Lampard’s 38-minute shot eventhough the video replay had clearly shown that the ball crossed the goal line for approximately 1 yard. Some people claimed that the disallowed goal changed the entire element of that game. If England were not denied of the goal, they probably would have fared better, in spirit and form, during the second half. This incident will ultimately ignite debates over goal-line technology since FIFA president Sepp Blatter has steadfastly refused to consider the possibility of goal-line technology.

Another refereeing controversy surrounded Luis Fabiano’s goal for Brazil against Ivory Coast. After the match, Luis Fabiano himself admitted that he handled the ball in the build-up to his second goal. Mexico also suffered a partial referee decision during their match against Argentina. Referee, Roberto Rosetti awarded Argentina a goal despite Carlos Tevez clearly being offside. Consequentially, both referees Jorge Larrionda and Roberto Rosetti were sent home.

The Final Two

Now, at this very moment, all eyes are set on Germany, Spain, Uruguay and the Netherlands. The Dutch already booked their ticket into the final match after they beat Uruguay 3-2. They will face either Spain or Germany this July 11th at Soccer City Stadium, Johannesburg.

(photo by gitfo)

“I was a France supporter back in ’98 and Zizou was and is my favourite player.”

Shaiful takes a break from the webby stuff to talk about the greatest sporting event on the planet. Shaiful Borhan is the Web Analyst and Developer at Stampede.

It’s down to the last eight in the FIFA World Cup 2010. In less than 2 weeks someone will be crowned the champion of the world. It has been a different viewing experience for me because this time I was pretty much a neutral fan. Being a neutral fan, the only thing I expect from the matches that I watched is good end-to-end football.

Quick background check, I’m not an all-time neutral though. I was a France supporter back in ’98 and Zizou was and is my favourite player. After he retired however, I tried but wasn’t able to really feel the excitement supporting the Blues anymore. Yes I’m talking about the excitement of WC ’98, Euro 2000, his injury in WC ’02 that saw the French team failed to go through and how he came out of retirement to bring them all the way to the finale of WC ’06 (and not to forget the iconic headbutt).

Back to 2010, I have to admit the team that caught my attention the most is Germany and the instrumental match they played against the English is my favourite match of the tournament so far. Not mainly because it’s a high-profile encounter, what impressed me a lot was the brilliant display of fluid playing by the German team of fresh faces with little international experience. Such a contrast than the line-up back then when the rest of the team were veterans in the likes of Kahn, Klinsmann and company.

Undeniably the match of the QF is Argentina vs. Germany. It is a historical clash, took place once in 1990 and recently four years ago and got very physical. Well this is the match I will look forward to in the QF. Somehow it felt like the finale came early with this one. I reckon it’s going to be good end-to-end football.

(photo by Grant Johnson)

One of the rules in today’s web is if you have forms on your website, you need to have some kind of spam prevention measure implemented. Here I will talk us through the several methods that can be used and why CAPTCHA isn’t one.

Why not CAPTCHA?

Well, spam prevention wise CAPTCHA challenge works. But the main problem is it considerably lowers the user experience by requiring extra effort and time to read the garbled image that may deter the user from completing the form altogether. To overcome that, they came out with the audio version of CAPTCHA which seriously, is even more troublesome. On top of that, having a CAPTCHA image certainly cripples the aesthetics of a well-designed form. With all these shortcomings however, CAPTCHA might be the best method to counter manual spammers (humans) because they would get too annoyed to do the CAPTCHA challenge.

Apart from image CAPTCHA, we could use a different version of challenge question method. One of the popular approaches is to present users with simple arithmetic operations e.g. “What is 4 + 2?”  As with CAPTCHA, it is also randomized each time the form reloads. Another variant is to use questions that requires textual answers such as “What animal meows?”. It should be noted that questions like these should be made simplistic as it introduces language barriers between the users and the system and to prevent the user from taking extra efforts.

Alternative “Are You Human?” Tests

The methods described above require user input in order to distinguish humans from spambots. This additional step can be eliminated by using a little bit of programming logic to validate the form submission on the server side.

Spambots usually love to fill out every field on the form. We can take advantage of this behaviour to trap the bots by setting up a field that is hidden from the user’s view, assuming it would not be filled by a legitimate human user. This field has to be a normal type=“text” with a tempting name like ‘email’ or ‘website’ except it has a CSS “display:none” property. The idea is to flag the form submission as spam if this field was filled. To cater screen reader users without CSS support, adequate label should be applied telling them to leave this field blank. Additionally, bots also have the tendency to post links and irrelevant keywords in textarea fields. A carefully crafted regex validation on these fields would help prevent faulty form submissions substantially.

Another advanced approach is to attach a unique, dynamically-generated token as a hidden field on your form and then check its validity upon submission. These tokens can be produced using session IDs or simply timestamps. The idea behind this method is to ensure the user viewing the form is essentially the same user submitting it. The timestamp method can be used to calculate the time elapsed between the page being viewed and submitted.

Modern Day Solutions

In order to stay concurrent with the advancement of spambots, the measures taken to combat spammers have also been taken a step further by using a collaborative, distributed and intelligent approach as can be seen in Akismet and Project Honey Pot. The Akismet service is fairly popular because it comes natively with Wordpress, arguably the most used blogging platform in the world. What it actually does is it runs numerous tests on the form submission data against its own huge collection of black/white list and returns the status with a thumbs up or thumbs down. The filter works by combining information about spam captured on all participating sites, and then using those spam rules to block future spam.

All in all, there will not be a silver bullet for solving web form spamming. Spambots will always become smarter and we quite surely couldn’t stop manual spamming. Nevertheless, with modern services like Akismet and Project Honey Pot the prospects certainly look promising.

Up to this hour, we’re still doing last minute removal of things from the original Stampede v3 design. With the amount of content we’re dealing with – 24 dissected portfolio pieces at last count – 8 months of detailing work on weekend and after hours don’t seem at all extravagant.

All in all, I spent around 180 hours of design time and that’s not only because of the level of complexity involved, but mostly the routine of going macro when everything is done, then removing almost half of it.

I still do incremental design change after sending the templates for Joomlafication, some so minute that only the most observant will notice. If we don’t have our own internal programming powerhouse, I can only imagine the costly bleeding.

Because this is the most ambitious project we have done for ourselves just yet, tension does run high and heated arguments over design vs code were so commonplace that when we finally come to an agreement, it was worth sitting back to take in what just happened. Such is the merry partnership I have with Dov.

It took 4 major revisions, countless minor ones, a bit of going back and forth with the rest of the team for valuable insight (whether to place this element or that on the right or left or scrap it altogether). Stampede v3 was almost a practice of convoluted layering (up to 400 at last count) to achieve a particular blend, testing out new composition for different content type, revising typography properties. Let me not bore you. Needless to say, it required plenty of patience as well.

Though I must say the only constant throughout the revisions was our signature color red. Our new logo and branding does not go through multiple iterations like most design agencies do. The branding – if you can call it that – was a split second decision of deciding what embodies Stampede. After that was decided and validated by the rest of the team, we now have a new logo, polished and all but still represents the very same identity.

Stampede has been very blessed and lucky, to say the least. We have a good score of clients who pretty much leave most design and development decision to us. We also get smart young people generous enough with their passion and time to become part of our team. I felt it’s about time for us to share values that have prevailed since Stampede’s very early days so we have designed and built a special page for this. As co-policymaker at Stampede, I probably have more fun with the Values page than most people expected.

So when v3 is finally launched, you may find it look way simpler than the actual effort – I sure hope so after the many hours spent mulling over what to safely remove and what to keep.

But then again, Stampede’s own website design has always been a sort of escapism for us from daily client requirements. It’s something we don’t do everyday and probably will never do again. For that reason alone, I know a few more days of punishing pixels is worth it.

“Where you finally associate faces to names you often hear blogging and follow, maybe even stalk, on Twitter.”

Shaza Hakim thinks WebCamp KL has the goods and gets the maddening itch to tell people about it. Shaza is the Creative Lead at Stampede.

So yesterday was Stampede’s second time attending the Kuala Lumpur chapter of WebCamp, hosted by MindValley. Webcamp, to borrow the term, is a series of free events in the spirit of BarCamp with specific focus on topics related to “working” on the internet. It’s a great place to catch up with the Malaysian web community and finally associate faces to names you often hear blogging and follow, maybe even stalk, on Twitter.

On to the reasons why I dig Webcamp KL…

The Gathering of Stampede

We’re working remotely, all of us. Dov and I in Langkawi, Shaiful in KL, Syazwan in Ipoh and Anita in Banda Aceh. Sometimes we gather in Langkawi for some little island time, sometimes we meet in the city to welcome new team members and chat with potential partnering prospects – idylic but nothing consistent. So WebCamp is about as frequent as it gets for us to meet each other every month. It’s also convenient excuse to sound all-important (and ridiculously pompous) “Oh sorry I won’t be around this week, heading to Kay-Eyl for a web development conference”.

Above all, any opportunity to meet and hang out with the team, having good time screaming at each other’s ears at the “after-party” (read: high-decible char kuey tiaw stalls) is a must-go. No exclusion.

Meeting Smart Malaysian Webheads

I don’t know who coined the term “webheads” but if it means being part of the “web eco-system” (who coined that one now?), count me in.

I meet heavyweight Malaysian web developers who talk about intriguing things like the mathematics of social web interaction, how minute tweakings dictate your online sales conversion and how determining the good side of your profile shot is crucial for an effective social branding. These are perhaps things that start to grow on you after 10-15 hours of exclusive Googling, but it brings substance when you listen to the condensed summary of it delivered by a next-door geek unlike yourself, born and bred in Malaysia, who probably enjoys a frothy cup of teh tarik too afterwards.

High-Profile, Schmo-Profile

There are a few celebrated figures in Malaysian web industry who are yet to grace the event, but I’m more than happy to meet the real deals – people who do amazing web work yet remain relatively low profile by choice.

Most who attend are active web people, professionals of their turf. And by professional I don’t mean the ubiquitous aesthetic quality but rather the fact that this is a full time commitment. That and the responsibility of getting damn good at it.

There’s a different type of camaraderie – that silent nod you give each other to acknowledge whatever war stories you have. Working webheads make a different group altogether. You are not college students making extra bucks doing safe design for mass purchase. You have clients to plan great things with, schedules to manage, team members to rally around and devise devilish things.

You also have bills to pay, spouses who worry you’re not doing much else besides switching from one screen to the next, parents having touble explaining what you do to curious neighbours. There is no other safety net, no try-outs but damn it if you don’t love every minute of it.

Gizmo Parade

Alright, at the peril of sounding like an insufferable out-of-towner, I saw the first iPads (two of ‘em) and Nexus One on a Webcamp. With MacBooks and iPhones, it’s almost like walking into an Apple-sponsored affair. And let’s not forget the Wonder Woman life-size model and statuette in every corner. Make no mistake, the web is a boys’ club and no place is more prevalent in its dude-ness than a web event. Though strangely, it’s nice to be one of the girls who play with boys too.

The Tweets

Like most web-related events, Twitter is heavily bombarded with #wckl hashtags as the event unfolds. We have livestreaming and if you’re stucked in traffic jam, chances are your fellow webbers will be wondering out kindly with a tweet.

I’ve always been a passive participant – I like to listen and make notes. You’ll see me nod occassionally when a topic validates – that’s as vocal as I get.

Now Twitter allows me to absorb the content and timeline of an event at my convenience. I can go back to and scan through everybody’s hashtags and say “yeah I thought what that dude said was spot on too!”.

You can probably tell by now that I don’t go to many events if trivial things like this makes me excited. You’re right. I don’t. But I sure go to the right event if I were to check on the tweets afterwards.

Wu Han

Finally, I think I speak for everyone when I say Ngeow Wu Han is the star of the show. The resident creative director at MindValley, he is the main driving force behind the conception of WebCamp KL and probably the Jay Z among Malaysian web designers. Working for a company geared towards the more lucrative American and international segment of the market, he’s quite the visionary to look back into the scarce inner circle of working webbers in Malaysia. It gives many of us a rare but clear glimpse that we have something really special brewing here.

Web Baby FTW

WebcampKL 4 was super special because four hours later, a baby Ngeow was born into the web world. Congratulations to proud parents @ngeow and @salameander. Now if we can get more webbers to procreate, we can introduce some hope to the population and usher in Malaysia’s Vision 2020 goal (sheesh am I really writing this?) in full tech gear and style.

(photos from WebcampKL on facebook by the multi-talented @dannyfoo)

Come to think of it, there are many better designers out there robbed of their deserving limelight because they are not in it for the fame. In the end, it’s the craft that matters.

Hers is no ordinary design work and I’m still awed, so I’m going to cut my post short here. You can also see Irina’s portfolio on Bēhance. Enjoy.

Good communication attracts great clients and bring about the happiest of team.

Anita Zein writes about the importance of communicating good especially in the wonderful chaos that comes with her project management turf. Anita is the Project Manager at Stampede.

In the work we do, everything involves multi-directional communication: telephone, messages, faxes, emails, even notes. A successful project or product is often achieved only if all parties involved truly understand each others motivation and goals.

In almost all aspects, communication is the one definitive role in the success of a project.

Working separately of distance and time with the team and the client is a new experience to me. Face to face communication is easier, but it’s not always possible. Even so, there is no excuse for a disconnect in communication, especially with a number of supporting facilities that allow for effective and accurate transfer of information. Distance and time is no longer an obstacle now even if your team and your clients are not in the same location, or in the same country.

Here at Stampede, we use all sort of communication tools: Basecamp, instant messaging, voice conference, email, telephone. We even send each other reminders via ReminderFox. All these tools, when applied right, greatly facilitate the type of work we do, to help deliver ideas and keep us focused on details. I do find written communication more productive. To me, everything noted and recorded can always be quickly reopened and referenced at any point of project development. There is very little margin of misinterpretation too.

Nevertheless, you shouldn’t depend sorely on communication tools. The most basics of communication delivery is also important to master. Firm messages are easiest to understand while properly composed questions will encourage productive discussion and further attention to details. Keep your communication clear and concise. Without it, misinterpretation is bound to happen and I have seen plenty of problems resulting from the tiniest of misunderstanding.

Any successful project accounts for delivery of work product on time and with agreed and planned quality. Poor communication can result in severe delays, uneven workload and consequently, hinder a company’s growth. Good communication, on the other hand, will attract great clients and bring about the happiest of team to work with.

(Image from MIX’s brilliant Building a Website, Explained)

Illustrations by Catrina Dulay, California.

“We are a company of perfectionists and working in this team has made me one too.”

Syazwan Hakim writes about the experience that led him to Stampede and what has transpired since. Syazwan is the Front-End Developer at Stampede.

My first experience with computer started in late 1997. Internet was still new and hype for many back then. I remember paying MYR1 for an hour of internet surfing at the nearby cybercafe. Since then, my interest in computer and internet blossomed quickly.

That was the era of addictiveness to Internet Relay Chat for windows or better known as mIRC. I did my very first mIRC Remotes against room menace such as spammers and abusive operators. That was the start of my programming experience.

In 2006, while studying at UniKL Malaysian Institute of Information Technology (UniKL MIIT), I learned to code in C++ and Java. I also did some part-timing, working on simple image processing. It was then that I recognized the importance of web image optimizing and how many different factors affect website load time. I also did some odd jobs at editing content in Joomla. That gave me a whole load of insight as to how Joomla works with HTML and CSS.

The Stampede Time

I was having my internship with a data company in KL when I was asked to try out the position of Front-End Developer at Stampede. Being an undergraduate, seeing real web developers in action has always interests me so I jumped on the plane to meet the lead developer, Dov. With what very little knowledge in programming, I absorbed the work culture and training pretty quickly.

Throughout the learning process in April 2009, I was in Langkawi during the weekends and then hurry back to KL for my internship work during weekdays. Because of the limited time, most of my practice happened remotely.

Dov taught me a few essential front-end guidelines that are important to Stampede: paying very close attention to design details in PSD artwork, W3C validation, cross-browser testing, semantic code and proper documentation among all. Most importantly, he also encouraged me to Google things up to build my web vocabulary.

Under Dov’s guidance, I began work with my first project. It was for one of our clients in the US. I didn’t look back. Back in KL, I started to explore more about HTML/CSS. I’ve found that the only way to truly master building front-end pages is through a lot of practice. So practice and practice I did.

As a rookie, I did encounter issues that I was too green to fix myself. But then again, I have Google. During my first few months at Stampede, I relied heavily on Google and the rest are pure trial-and-error until I’m satisfied that the issues are fixed. Like most of us, I was having a hard time trying to render everything correctly on IE6 and IE7. I didn’t know that Stampede used to cater to IE 5.5 even!

How It Has Been

I think that a front-end developer holds a very unique position in a team. You have to be well-versed in both design and web programming. You need to know what the web designer wants to achieve and how to build the code efficiently for the web programmer. We’re very particular about design details (whitespace, text leading, typography etc) and it’s a very rewarding challenge for me to build webpages that are as accurate to the artwork as possible while still keeping them organized, efficient and valid. We are a company of perfectionists and working in this team has made me one too.

The Road From Here On

Despite the workload, learning new things is necessary too. You shouldn’t get too comfortable with the knowledge you have at present. Take the initiative to try something new and see how far you can go. I’m now going into some Javascripting and using frameworks like Mootools and jQuery. XHTML/CSS templating into Joomla is next on my list. Huge thanks to my Stampede team for their encouragement and guidance.

So that’s my story of how I became Stampede’s front-end developer. How about you? What’s your story?

(photo and more Lego Star Wars by Mike Stimpson)

“Suddenly you feel like an underdog. Ain’t life grand.”

Shaza Hakim fulfills her duty (so requested by Shaiful Borhan) as the chronicler of Stampede Design’s annual on-campus interview at Universiti Teknologi Petronas. Shaza is the Creative Lead at Stampede.

Consider An On-Campus Interview

You are an IT student, black circles under your eyes from that last attempt at submitting your Final Year Project in one coherent piece. You have an interview with a web company and you’ve heard all sort of cautionary tales and advise about your future career.

The university indulges you but being in IT, you can’t help but feeling marginalized over your fellow soon-to-be engineer friends. This is after all, an engineering university, where engineering future is made.

You are under-motivated, overworked and just barely made it to your 8.30 am interview. You heard you are one of six students selected from a pool of forty. You’re confident that your well-ironed shirt will leave a good impression, until you see another student arrived in a black suit with a sleek briefcase in tow, looking all polished and caffeinated. Suddenly you feel like an underdog. Ain’t life grand.

You walked into the interview room and exchanged greetings with the interviewers. They looked young and somewhat casual, probably mid-20s. They screened your resume and you started to sweat. You began to wonder if you spelled “proficient” correctly. Acting nonchalant, you flashed your biggest smile. Then one of them shot the first question,

“How good are you with PHP?”

I dare say the students we interviewed that Friday morning were in for a surprise.

Why We Interview?

To most companies, this is a blasphemy. “Of course you interview to hire more people in order to grow your business and generate more income.” I disagree.

Stampede’s hiring rate is one person a year, but we work hard and interview far and wide to get that one person. I believe that you do not have to hire many to achieve whatever goals you choose for your company. In most cases, you’re only adding unnecessary overhead to your otherwise agile and flexible team.

The number of employees you have is not a prerequisite to a successful business. You can be successful by staying small if staying small means keeping your people happy and giving your client work quality no bigger company can. By hiring at the rate of one person a year, Stampede is able to focus on training and introduction to our work culture, not by how quickly the person can start hacking codes. Most importantly, we are able to grow sustainably, without compromising our values.

Why Fresh Graduates?

Amazingly, this is the least-tapped pool of young talents in Malaysia. Most companies either look for candidates with significant industry experience or fresh grads with outstanding academic qualifications. Passion is often not in the equation.

Here’s what I think. People with experience tend to have one very big disadvantage: they bring with them culture from their previous work place. When they join Stampede, they tend to be highly individualized, not ready to share knowledge or responsibility. They sometimes conflict sense of teamwork with personal gain. Stampede is an office-politic-free environment. We keep communication flat so we can avoid elaborate hierarchical structure. This is not the case with other working environment where hierarchy is a way to manage and control.

In my years of interviewing and hiring, I personally find that fresh graduates should truly be the darlings of the industry. They are young and idealistic, eager to be an active part of the team. They are not (yet) affected by bad life choices. Most importantly, they bring a different level of energy to a company.

Some managers balk at the training cost. It does take more effort and patience to guide these high-octane powerhouses towards the right direction, but at the end of the day, we are in the business of nurturing talent and giving them work they are passionate about.

When you have a team of people truly invested in their work, you are doing it right.

“How Good Are You With PHP?”

Because we have a web developer vacancy, Dov did the preliminary filtering this time around. He easily trimmed a stack of resumes into six short-listed faces – a feat I never quite managed to do. A resume can be very misleading, with happy internship pictures and big company name-dropping. The most essential element we looked for was promising web programming skill. You may have interned at Intel but if you’re not good in PHP, then we’d rather not be wasting your time.

Dov as usual, was very direct about his requirements. He’s very involved with the hiring process of any new programmer and can be brutal with questions. There were times when I wished I weren’t in the student’s shoe. I am sure Shaiful and Guo Lin know this well. When he’s interested with a student’s PHP work, Dov would reach across the table, grabbed the laptop and dissected the code himself. It wasn’t a pretty sight when he ever-so-gloriously did an SQL injection vulnerability test via the login prompt. The student went pale. He only got his colors back when Dov said “That’s okay, you’re new.”

My questions, on the other hand, were centered more on the soft skills – what aspect of web development that really interests the student, what he aspires to, what an ideal workplace is like to him. These are important because we are, at the most basic, a team. We spend a great deal of time working together so the next person to join the team should be just as fun. Besides, I was due for a Stampede dinner that weekend to relay the summary of our interview to the rest of the team.

Some of the students however, were interested in other fields. One was into computer networking and the other quite a decent ASP programmer. They were honest enough to let us know the type of work they’re interested in. You could easily see that these are good students, though perhaps misguided by their seniors to simply settle for any job opportunities.

My advise in return, don’t compromise your interest. There’s only so much opportunity in life to do what you love, so start steering your way towards that now.

Was It Worth It?

For sure. The students left the interview room happier than when they came in. That alone makes it a good interview day for me.

(wonderful photography by Antontang)