Good news bloggers and website owners! CareerCup has just launched its new affiliate program. CareerCup's affiliate programs allows website owners to post a link / ad for CareerCup's interview guide and, in return, collect some of the revenue from any sale. Best of all, it's super-easy to use!
We offer two designs: Horizontal (example) and Vertical (example)
Preliminary tests have shown that it far outperforms Google Adsense ads. Want in on the action? Great! Follow these instructions, or just tweak this code:
<SCRIPT type="text/javascript" src="http://www.careercup.com/js/affiliate.js"></SCRIPT> <SCRIPT type="text/javascript"> var cc_width = 650; var cc_font_size = 12; var cc_header_font_size = 14; var cc_background = '#FFFFFF'; var cc_header_color = '#009193'; var cc_guarantee_color = '#FF0000'; var cc_link_color = '#009193'; var cc_type = 'horizontal'; writeAffiliateCode('mydomain.com', '1'); </SCRIPT>
When you've got it up and running, email me your name, paypal account, and url. You'll get a 20% cut of the revenue and will be paid each month.
Microsoft Loyalty Scorecard: + 1: Using Microsoft search at work. - 1: Using Microsoft search to prepare for your upcoming interviews... at work.
Kumo is Microsoft's new search engine that was released internally this month. No one seems to be talking about it much externally, and it doesn't show up in Google Analytics under "Search Engines". Kumo is, however, listed as a referring site for my site, CareerCup, which helps prepare for technical interviews. Almost all the Kumo users are, of course, from Redmond with a couple in Bellevue and Toyko.
Well, hey - while it's not so nice to look for a new job while at work, at least you're using Microsoft's search engine to get there. Your boss must be thrilled.
After I left Google and got the travel bug out of my system, I joined a tiny funded start-up called EmptySpaceAds. What excited me about EmptySpaceAds was more than just the product (although that was pretty neat) - it was the opportunity. With just one employee, EmptySpaceAds was small enough that I would lead the engineering effort. But, at the same time, it was funded. Funding = credibility + a great network of advisors. Our investors are actively involved - in all the right ways. How many other teeny tiny start-ups can say that they have funding? Not many! ;-)
Now, six months later, it looks like I may need to relocate and thus EmptySpaceAds must hire a replacement.
Know a rockstar developer - who wants to lead a start-up? Read on for the job posting!
Software Engineer / VP of Engineering at EmptySpaceAds
With over 40% of the space on web page consisting of "empty space" (margins, etc), empty space is the remaining element of the web to be monetized. EmptySpaceAds is turning previously wasted empty space into a growing revenue stream for our web publishers. Publishers no longer have to decide whether to use the margins for ads or for the aesthetic value of empty space - they can do both!
EmptySpaceAds is a small but well-funded startup. We are funded by Second Ave Partners.
Our Product EmptySpaceAds allows a website owner to utilize the page margins for both "empty space" (eg, pages look better with a bit of emptiness), and for ads.
How does that work?
Our ads only show up when a visitor's mouse hovers over the margins of a page. This means that when you visit a web page, it'll look just as "pretty" as it did before. But, when your mouse hovers over the margins, an ad will (gracefully) fade in behind the margin.
And, here's the best part: because the ads are reacting to the user's mouse rather than being always-present, users don't experience "banner blindness." Publishers will see high click-through rates.
Who We're Looking For We're looking for someone who is more than an engineer. Someone who can jump in and make decisions. Someone who can prioritize and schedule our product releases. Someone who can lead the engineering effort. Someone who can drive our product's success.
As employee #2, you will be instrumental to the company's success!
Here's why you should join us:
You will have incredible impact in our company as our first Software Engineer
You will lead our engineering effort... future developers we hire will report to you
Learn what it takes to run a startup. Interact with the founder daily and attend meeting with the company's investors.
You will reboot your career. You'll learn more, fail more, succeed more, and take away more than you ever would at the equivalent Big Company experience.
Hard Requirements:
B.S. Computer Science or equivalent experience
Minimum two years of professional experience
Possess initiative, leadership abilities, and the ability to make difficult engineering decisions
Location: Seattle, WA (Pioneer Square)
Full Time Only
How To Apply Please email jobs@emptyspaceads.com with the following information:
Resume / CV
[OPTIONAL] Pointers to software you've written. Examples: open source contributions, examples of source code you've written, examples of live production software you wrote or were a contributor to
[OPTIONAL] Links to places you discuss software. Examples: your blog, your website, etc
"We will be taking memcache offline tomorrow morning from 9-10am PST (GMT-8) for routine maintenance. Calls to the memcache API will *not* throw exceptions but will instead return false for set() calls and None for get() calls (just like any other cache miss.) Your app should continue serving normally during this period, and we'll keep you updated on our progress."
Google writes this as though it's "no biggie - we're just disabling caching for an hour - your app will operate as normal".
If you've used App Engine, you know how ridiculous that is. You can't operate an App Engine site without lots and lots of caching.
App Engine takes your generous daily quota and divides it up into tiny little minute or second long quotas. Their logic is something like this:
You can eat 2000 calories in one day. Hurray! That's a lot of food!
It's good to pace yourself and not eat it all at once. Absolutely. You wouldn't want to pig out on breakfast and not be able to eat anything else all day.
Therefore, we will only let you eat 1.4 calories per minute. Well, f*ck. Pass me two thirds of a tic tac?
CareerCup gets about 10,000 page views per day - not the smallest site, but hardly the biggest. CareerCup cannot operate without heavy caching. By taking down caching, they took down my site for an hour. Not cool.
Now, Google could have mitigated this by removing the absurdly small quotas temporarily. CareerCup would have run slowly, but at least it would have run. Instead, though, users get punished for expensive-ish queries, with no chance to avoid it. Not cool.
This brings me to my next point: Google, if you're going to take down people's sites, can you pick a better time than 9am - 10am? Try, perhaps, 2am - 3am? I know you don't want to come into work at 2am. I know it's not really Google culture to tell a team that they have to be at work and away from their families 2am. But you have to. You have real users operating real businesses, many of which are a whole lot bigger than CareerCup. We depend on you to keep our websites up.
Google: Don't act like taking down memcache doesn't disable our sites. And don't disable our sites at 9am when you could've done this 2am.
I've been using Talkinator, an embeddable chat program for websites, for a few months now.
I realize I might be the only post-1995 site to want a chatroom, but it's actually rather useful. For example, when people are discussing, say, Microsoft Interview Questions, they'll jump in the chatroom to discuss problems. This use was expected.
The more interesting use-case was simply feedback. People hesitate feedback via email, or even through anonymous forms. They will, however, jump in a chatroom and complain. I've discovered a number of bugs this way.
So, without further ado, I present the the Top 10 Best Microsoft Interview Questions:
Microsoft Interview Question #10 Given two nodes in a binary tree, find the first common parent node. You are not allowed to store any nodes in a data structure.
Microsoft Interview Question #7 Given two sets of objects, S1 and S2, write an algorithm to determine their subset relationship. Eg, which of the following is true: C1 is a subset of C2, C2 is a subset of C1, C1 equals C2, or none of these?
Microsoft Interview Question #6 Given a value in a binary search tree, print all the paths (starting from the root or any other node) which sum up to that value.
Microsoft Interview Question #5 Imagine there is a square matrix with n x n cells. Each cell is either filled with a black pixel or a white pixel. Design an algorithm to find the maximum subsquare such that all four borders are filled with black pixels.
Microsoft Interview Question #4 How would you divide an integer array into 2 sub-arrays such that their averages were equal?
Microsoft Interview Question #3 Given two binary trees T1 and T2 which store character data, write an algorithm to decide whether T2 is a subtree of T1. T1 has millions of nodes and T2 has hundreds of nodes, and each may have duplicates.
Microsoft Interview Question #2 Implement boggle: Given an NxN matrix, print a list of all words that appear in the matrix. To find a word, you can move left, right, up or down, as long as you do not use the same letter twice. For example, if the matrix were: W A D R You could find the words: WAR, WARD, DRAW and RAW Microsoft Interview Question #1 Design a webcrawler.
Gayle Laakmann is a Wharton MBA student and owns two businesses, CareerCup and Seattle Anti-Freeze. She has previously worked for Microsoft, Apple, Google and, most recently, EmptySpaceAds.
Good news bloggers and website owners! CareerCup has just launched its new affiliate program. CareerCup's affiliate programs allows website owners to post a link / ad for CareerCup's interview guide and, in return, collect some of the revenue from any sale. Best of all, it's super-easy to use!
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