Data visualization projects and occasional writing by Drew Hoover.https://drewhoover.com/https://drewhoover.com/blog/questions-i-like-to-ask-my-interviewer/https://drewhoover.com/blog/questions-i-like-to-ask-my-interviewer/There’s a lot of advice on the internet for job candidates on how to answer job interview questions, but not much on how to ask good questions, the importance of which scales with seniority. 2 qualities of good questions 1. They’re open-ended When I ...Wed, 12 Mar 2025 14:19:58 GMThttps://drewhoover.com/blog/going-deep-on-type-checking-mock-resolvers-for-graphql-test-fixtures/https://drewhoover.com/blog/going-deep-on-type-checking-mock-resolvers-for-graphql-test-fixtures/In the last post, I demonstrated how to use GraphQL mocking tools to easily & succinctly create low-maintenance test fixtures with a helper function called createMockData, and very briefly covered how to type-check it using the IMocks type from the @...Tue, 14 Jan 2025 20:17:11 GMThttps://drewhoover.com/blog/how-to-write-simple-expressive-and-powerful-test-fixtures-for-graphql-applications/https://drewhoover.com/blog/how-to-write-simple-expressive-and-powerful-test-fixtures-for-graphql-applications/In this blog post series, I'm going to explain 2 things: How to use mocking tools to create simple, expressive, and powerful mocking interfaces How to type-check those interfaces to make them effortless to use #1 is not a terribly unique concept;...Tue, 14 Jan 2025 20:16:30 GMThttps://drewhoover.com/blog/how-to-make-a-good-side-project/https://drewhoover.com/blog/how-to-make-a-good-side-project/Side projects occupy this weird space in our discipline, because they're halfway expected of you. No other discipline does this; if you're a technical writer, nobody is gonna ask you "do you have any technical writing side projects?" I choose to inte...Thu, 19 Dec 2024 05:00:00 GMThttps://drewhoover.com/blog/drews-mentoring-maxims/https://drewhoover.com/blog/drews-mentoring-maxims/I’ve had some success mentoring folks. I’ve also had some failures! I’m providing them here as a list of maxims for anyone interested. They may not work on your machine! Mentoring happens in loops This may sound silly, but if you want to mentor someo...Wed, 18 Dec 2024 05:00:00 GMThttps://drewhoover.com/blog/why-deadlines-are-hard-and-why-forecasts-are-better/https://drewhoover.com/blog/why-deadlines-are-hard-and-why-forecasts-are-better/Everyone knows the four hardest problems in software engineering are cache invalidation off-by-one errors meeting deadlines naming things This post is about the 2nd problem: meeting deadlines. Why it's hard I'm actually not going to get into al...Mon, 16 Dec 2024 05:00:00 GMT