For those of you who actually have, or are thinking about getting a Pinebook Pro and would like to know how to avoid the stupid mistakes I made, here are some specific details I learned.

Get the Right Image

I wanted to install the Manjaro XFCE version. So I wanted the image for that. This was my first point of confusion. I knew I wanted an eMMC installer image. There are links here: https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php?title=Pinebook_Pro_Software_Release#Manjaro_ARM

If you get an image direct from Manjaro, it will NOT be an eMMC boot image. You have to go to osdn.net. And even there, it’s confusing. First you’ll see a list of releases.

Naturally, you’ll go for the lastest one, currently 20.08, and you’ll see this:

None of those are eMMC installers though. If you use any of those, it will only install Manjaro onto the SD card that you booted from. You have to go back, in this case, to 20.04. Then you’ll see this:

Oho! An actual eMMC installer image. This would have saved me many hours had I looked beyond the latest release. And don’t forget that Manjaro is a rolling release, so it doesn’t really matter which one you get, it’s going to be fully up to date as soon as you do your first update. At least that’s mostly true. There may be minor differences that I don’t know about, but effectively, it’s fine.

Run the Installer. Hit Escape!

Burn the installer onto at least an 8GB SD card and boot the PBP with that card inserted. It’s going to hang on the loader screen. At least at the time of this writing anyway. There’s a bug in the eMMC image that causes this. Just hit escape and you’ll be in the installer.

It will walk you through some choices that should be mostly obvious. You want to choose to install to the eMMC. That should be mmcblk2. Whereas the SD card you booted from should be mmcblk1.

Note: Once you’ve got everything installed, you can put a non-bootable SD card in the slot and use it for extra storage. It won’t affect the boot process.

The Manjaro ARM Installer

The Pine64 wiki also mentions this script:

https://gitlab.manjaro.org/manjaro-arm/applications/manjaro-arm-installer

It sounds lovely. Install the script, run it, choose your distro, choose the target, sit back and it does everything. This is what soft-bricked my PBP though and caused me hours of despair. I may have just been unlucky. I haven’t seen reports of others having the same trouble. But personally, I won’t try that method again.

Fixing a Soft Brick

As I have come to understand it, the PBP will boot first from a bootable SD card if one is inserted. Otherwise it will try to boot from the eMMC module. However, you can wind up messing up your eMMC to the point where the PBP won’t boot at all. In some cases this means the power light won’t even turn on. This is what happened to me. It sure seems like a hard, fatal brick situation, but don’t despair. It’s fixable.

It has something to do with something called a uboot, which I guess is kind of like a boot block / grub kind of concept, which controls the boot process. If that gets messed up, you aint booting nothing.

So you have to bypass that completely. You do that by completely disabling the eMMC.

1. Open up the PBP. This is a simple matter of undoing 10 screws. The PBP is made to be easily open-able and internally upgrade-able. There’s a small switch there that disables the eMMC. Consult https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php?title=Pinebook_Pro#Pinebook_Pro_Internal_Layout to locate it. You want to move it to the position away from the hinge, towards the inside of the computer.
2. Note: be VERY careful when using the computer with the bottom cover off. Pine warns that opening the lid without the cover on can damage the hinge. Of course you’ll need to open the lid a bit to boot it and see what’s going on. Just be very careful.
3. Now you should be able to boot from a bootable eMMC installer image on an SD card. Verify this.
4. Next you need to reboot and during the boot process, flip that switch back to enabled. If you do it too soon, you won’t be able to boot. Apparently, if you do it at exactly the right moment, 2 seconds into the boot process, the PBP will boot and the eMMC will mount. But if you are too late, the eMMC won’t mount. That’s fine though. The next step will handle that.
5. As mentioned above, the eMMC installer image will hang. Just hit escape and you’ll be in the installer.
6. You can try the install process at this point. The eMMC may have mounted. In the step where it asks you where you want to flash the image, if you see mmcblk2 you are good to go!
7. There’s a good chance that the eMMC will not be mounted, so you’ll need to mount it manually. Choose “No” in the first screen of the installer and you should be dropped back into a root command prompt:
   
   [root@manjaro-arm ~]# _
   
8. There are two commands you can type here that should mount the eMMC:
   
   echo fe330000.sdhci >/sys/bus/platform/drivers/sdhci-arasan/unbind
echo fe330000.sdhci >/sys/bus/platform/drivers/sdhci-arasan/bind
   
   These are covered here: https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php?title=Pinebook_Pro#eMMC_information
   
9. To verify that this worked, you can type lsblk and you should see mmcblk2 in that list.
10. From there, type exit and you should be back to the installer, which should now work fine.

Resources

Read this entire page: https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php?title=Pinebook_Pro

Use the forums: https://forum.pine64.org/ – particularly the Linux on PBP forum.

The official Pine64 subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/

Back Story

A while back I bought a Pinebook laptop. This was the original 11-inch, white plastic model. It cost $99 plus shipping.

The idea was great – a cheap ARM laptop that you could grab and go and not worry too much what happened with it. But in practice, it was not even remotely usable. The specs on processor and network speed and memory were just not there. You couldn’t watch YouTube on it. Just loading any non-trivial web page was painfully slow. The touchpad was meh, but the keyboard was just atrocious. Not so much the feel, but the layout. Way too cramped. Keys for common symbols like | and " required a modifier key AND a shift key, turning them into a three-key combo. And the right hand shift key wasn’t even the size of a regular key. I could NEVER hit that one correctly.

It was just unpleasant to use. So it’s been sitting in my unused hardware pile ever since. Occasionally I take it out and try to do something with it, but it’s not worth it.

The Upgrade

Then the Pinebook Pro came out and I started hearing some good reviews. The first thing I did was check out the keyboard layout. It actually looked OK. This version costs $199 plus shipping. But has a much better processor, more memory and all around decent specs. It’s still a cheap ARM machine, but from all reports it seemed to be usable. It’s been in the back of my mind to give it a try for a while, but each time I checked it out, they were out of stock. They get made in batches, so sometimes you just can’t order. Recently I got interested again and saw that pre-orders were open and shipping on August 25. I pulled the trigger. Amazingly, not only did it actually ship on the 25th, but it got from Hong Kong to Boston in just two days. I was stunned.

It Arrives! I Brick It!

If you just want a review, skip to the end of this post. Stick around if you want to hear an epic tale of stupidity.

I opened up the package. I’ll get more into the build, etc. later. But first, my tale of woe. I booted it up. It had 86% battery and comes preinstalled with Manjaro KDE ARM. Got into it, set up my user, all good. First of all I love Manjaro. That’s what I run these days on any Linux desktop. But I like the XFCE version. KDE is nice. If XFCE vanished tomorrow, I’d go to KDE. But since there’s Pinebook Pro Manjaro XFCE image available, I wanted to use that.

A little understanding of PBP hardware. It’s main “hard drive” is an eMMC memory module. An eMMC is flash memory that’s better than an SD card, but not as great as an SSD. The PBP comes with a 64GB eMMC. It also has an SD slot that you an boot from. If there’s a bootable card in the slot, it will boot from that, otherwise it goes to the eMMC. So you can get a supported OS image and burn it onto an SD card and boot from that. But really you want to install the new OS to the eMMC. So there are eMMC install images specially made to do that. But every image I tried just installed onto the SD card. So I had to try an alternate way to install to the eMMC. Spoiler alert: this was where my stupidity enters in.

I found another installer method here: https://gitlab.manjaro.org/manjaro-arm/applications/manjaro-arm-installer

This seems to download the image of your choice, burn it to an SD card and then flash it back to the eMMC all in one script. Ran that and it seemed to be fine. Until it ran into an error and the power light started flashing red and green and everything froze up.

I rebooted. No. I tried to reboot. Nothing. Not even a power light. I knew the battery wasn’t dead. So this looked bad. Read some help. It gave some advice that involved opening up the computer. Well… that escalated quickly. But in fairness, the PBP is designed to be hackable. It opens very easily. There’s add on items you can put in there, etc. There’s also a switch in there to disable the eMMC, a reset button, and a few other physical controls.

All the connections were good, the eMMC was enabled. No joy.

Unbricking

I was pretty sure I had hard bricked it. But the more I read, the more I saw people saying that you CANNOT brick a PBP via flashing images. You can soft brick it, which is what I did, but it’s recoverable. Promising. What you do is disable the eMMC with that switch. Then it should power up and boot off the SD card. After probably a couple of hours of despair, I got it booting off the SD card! Whew.

OK, back in business, sort of. I still have to flash the eMMC, but now I have a catch 22. I can’t flash the eMMC because it’s disabled. But if I enable it, then the machine won’t boot.

Option one: apparently, you can do this thing where you boot the machine with eMMC disabled, and exactly two seconds into the boot, you flip the switch to enable it. That allows you to boot from the SD card and then have access to the eMMC. I had no luck with this method.

Option two: someone figured out that you could boot disabled, later enable it, and then run a few commands to mount it. This one worked!

OK, I was officially unbricked. Now I’m back to the point where I needed to flash the OS.

Another Failed Flash, But No Brick

There’s not a lot of magic in the flashing process. It comes down to using the dd tool to write the image to the eMMC. You can just do that manually as long as the eMMC is mounted. There are also some scripts out there that do that will run the command correctly for you. I got one of those, got the right image and ran it. It seemed to go fine. Reported success. Rebooted, and it tried to load, but would not fully boot.

The plus point is that the eMMC itself seemed fixed. I didn’t have to disable it to boot off the SD card. So I could close up the back of the computer again.

Back to Square One… and Success!

OK, now I was back to my original question of how to flash an image onto the eMMC. More reading up on people dding images led to more discussions about the eMMC installer images that never worked for me in the first place. But they seemed to work for others. It turns out that I was always going for the latest release. When I looked back a couple of releases, I found one that was very explicitly labeled emmc-installer-image. OMG. Slap on the forehead moment.

Well this sounded like exactly what I wanted originally. Downloaded it, burnt it to an SD card and booted it up. And it sat there on the loading screen forever. Sigh…

Tried some other images, other SD cards, all the same.

More reading and I see this little mention of a bug in the eMMC installer where it seems to hang. Oh! That’s me! The complicated fix is to… hit the escape key. Surely it couldn’t be that simple. But, yes, yes, it was. That was the final piece of the puzzle. Finally I was able to flash Manjaro XFCE Arm onto the Pinebook Pro. And it was only a little after midnight. Played around with it for a few minutes and then went to bed with a headache.

The Review

OK, so what is this thing like, now that I finally had it running with the OS I wanted?

First, let me say that most of the above is my fault. If I’d only looked around a little bit and found the eMMC installer image, I would have saved several hours. I’d even seen a message about the hang and escape fix, but had forgotten all about it hours later. But the documentation on all of this could have been a lot better. Most of what I learned was on various forum posts. So that’s the first takeaway. This is NOT a consumer device. If you want something that you can just plug in and have it work, this aint it. You gotta be ready and willing to dig in and search and experiment and tweak things. I’m fine with all that, personally.

OK, onto the review…

Build-wise, it’s surprisingly nice for a $200 machine. It’s got a full metal case. Magnesium alloy I think. Feels solid, heavier than I expected. Maybe like Macbook Air thickness. The hinge is good. The body itself is a bit flexible though.

The screen is pretty decent. 1920×1080. In fact it’s on par, if not better than the screen on my ThinkPad T480. Granted, that’s a low bar, but again, for the price point, that’s impressive.

The keyboard is not bad at all. Not the best ever, but I’m comfortable typing on it. No problems with the layout. Everything is where it should be and the size it should be. No funky modifiers needed for common keys.

The touchpad is one of the weak points. Out of the box at least. I hated it. Sluggish, unresponsive, hard to get it on the thing you want to click. But with some research and tweaking of settings, I’ve now got it to the point where it’s workable for me. I was actually pretty happy with how much I was able to improve it with settings. Luckily I’d been through this plenty of times in the past with Linux on laptops. I know my way around all those settings.

Sound is awful. Not just quality but volume. Cranked all the way up, I literally can’t understand anything if the air conditioner is on nearby. Even with headphones plugged in, the volume on those is really low. I might be able to find some settings to improve that eventually. But I don’t plan on using this for media anyway.

Webcam is meh. Better than I thought it would be actually.

Ports: on the right, SD card, headphones, USB A.

On the left, USB C, USB A, power barrel connector. You can also power and charge over USB C, which is great.

Performance is not too bad. It doesn’t compare with a full x86 laptop or desktop of course, but it’s functional. Web pages load decently. A bit slower than I’m used to, but workable. I played some full screen 1080p video from YouTube and it was fine. No lag, nice and crisp, audio in sync with video. I was impressed. Currently, services like Netflix and Hulu do not work. I assume that’s due to the DRM software not working on ARM. There might be ways around that. I haven’t had a chance to test it out yet.

Mostly I intend to use the computer for some lightweight dev stuff. The price, size and low power consumption make it a great machine to grab and go with. So I’ve been testing some of my existing code projects on it.

I got my blgo framework up and running. I had to download the ARM version of Golang, but that was easy enough. Definitely compiles and runs stuff slower than on my other machines, but perfectly fine for on the go hacking on stuff. It also definitely has some hard limits on memory. I can create a 300 frame animated gif. But Imagemagick crashes on anything longer than that. And for creating sill images, I was able to do 1920×1080, and double that – 3840×2160, but beyond that things don’t render right. Once it even crashed me right out of my session, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. The computer was still running, but it kicked me back to the login screen.

I also got my bitlib_c library projects running with no problem whatsoever. I didn’t stress test those, but I assume they’ll have the same hard limits.

And I’ve currently got a Java project I started working on. Was able to install the latest OpenJDK and got that project running without a hitch.

Summary

Overall, I’m very happy with it. It’s a fun machine and completely functional once you know its limits. It’s a perfect machine for throwing in a bag and commuting with, or maybe traveling with or just bringing with you somewhere where you might want to use a computer but don’t want to bring your main machine. If you want a cheap Linux machine to hack on, this is way better than getting a Chromebook and trying to force Linux to work on that. I speak from experience.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about resumes. The obvious follow up is about interviews. Again, this post reflects my own experiences and opinions, not any official policies or procedures of my company.

I’ve done more technical interviews in the last few years than I could count. But I’m not going to talk about technical interviews here. What I’ve been doing for the past month or so is the initial screening calls, where I just have a conversation with the person, do introductions, ask some general questions about background, skills, likes, dislikes, experience, etc. It’s been a really nice break from the tech interviews. And I’ve learned so much from doing these.

Like resumes, there’s no real magic in passing these interviews. But there are all kinds of things that you can do really easy to mess it up and ruin any chance of going further in the process. We go into interviews with the principle of “start with yes.” We start with the idea that we’re going to hire you, and it’s up to you to convince us not to do so. Sadly, people are really good at convincing people not to hire them.

The way I do these screening interviews is I give a quick introduction to myself, my background and what I do now. 30-45 seconds max. Then I invite the person to do the same. I figure they’ll kind of mirror what I did and give a brief intro. It’s probably more important for them to tell me about themselves than vice versa, so they usually go a bit longer than I do – maybe a minute or two. But some people go on and on and on, giving me a life history, every job they had, everything they did and every technology they used in every job. Some people just take control of the interview. I don’t encourage them to do so, but I don’t try too hard to stop them either. How they relate with me in the interview is probably how they’re going to relate to their coworkers on the job. It tells me a lot.

Generally though, people don’t screw that part up too badly. They might talk a bit much, but I’ll attribute that to nerves. No problem.

Then I get to my first question.

What interested you in this position?

It might sound harsh, but 10-20% of candidates blow the interview right then and there. Some of the worst answers I’ve had, but which I hear surprisingly often:

• I’m just applying to every front end job I see.
• I don’t remember.
• I just need a job.

If that’s how someone answers my first question, and they just leave it at that, I’m done. I’ll go through the rest of the interview, but unless they do something amazing, I’m totally checked out and my mind is made up. If that’s the level of effort someone puts into getting a job, I have no interest in finding out how much effort they’ll put into doing that job if they get it.

Table stakes for this kind of question is something how it’s a great match for your skill set, the tech stack, etc. You haven’t particularly impressed me with that, but you haven’t annoyed either.

Even better is, “I really like the idea of your business and what you’re doing…” or a personal anecdote that shows some connection with you and the business.

Then there’s the really good ones. “Well, I was reading on your site about how recently you…” or “I was doing some research and read about your partnership with…” Yes! This person spent a few minutes reading our site, or did a Google search and read something and remembered it. You’re interested in us. Now I’m interested in you.

Tell me about your current or most recent job.

And what you do / did there. What you liked / didn’t like there. Interesting things you worked on, etc.

It’s hard to screw this part of the interview up. I think the only way you can really destroy this part is by being totally bored. “I built some apps,” kind of answer. Or you could totally trash your previous company. Surprisingly few people actually do that though.

This part of the interview is a good place to make some points though. Talk about a really cool project you got to work on and tell me how interesting it was and what the challenges were and what you learned doing it. As you are talking about your last company in the past, I’m envisioning you working at our company in the future. What are you going to be like? Are you going to be into your job and get excited about challenges? Or are you going to be bored and lifeless?

What are your strengths (and weaknesses)?

To be honest, this part is like a well choreographed dance. You’re going to state some strengths whether they’re true or not. Then when I ask about you’re weaknesses, you’ll reiterate those strengths as “weaknesses”.

“It’s a double edged sword…”

“Attention to detail, but I sometimes get too caught up in making things perfect.”

Or a million variations.

If you have less experience, you’re going to tell me that you’re a fast learner.

Of course not everyone plays along. Someone recently told me that one of their weaknesses was that they were a slow learner. I was stunned. Nobody ever said that in an interview, ever. Everyone says they’re a fast learner in an interview.

Sometimes more senior developers have just gotten beyond that game and will just flat out tell me what they are good at and what they are not so good at. It’s refreshing.

Usually, I don’t get too much out of this question anyway. So play along or be honest. But not too honest. 🙂

What are you looking for in your next job?

Worst answer: parrot back the job title you are interviewing for, or the tech stack.

What are you looking for? A front end React position.

No kidding. I want to know what you are hoping for, what you are envisioning.

Less experienced developers will very often talk about learning, mentorship, growth, etc. More senior candidates will talk about taking on more responsibility, new challenges, and also growth.

I think the learning and mentorship answer from newer candidates is fine. But way too many candidates go too deep on this theme, mentioning it several times throughout the interview. Again, it’s not horrible. If you’re junior, we’ll definitely be mentoring you, and helping you learn and grow. But even if you’re junior, I want to know what you are going to bring to the table. You could earn some points here by talking about how you want to take on responsibility, contribute to the team, mentor people with less experience than you, or whatever value you think you can offer.

What questions do you have for me?

This question forms a pair of bookends with the first question. If you really don’t want the job, just say, “none.” You won’t get the job. If you want the job, ask at least 3-4 good questions. The more, the better, but don’t go over schedule. Like the first question, it shows that you are interested and prepared. One good example a few people have asked:

“I saw that your competitors are companies X, Y, and Z. How do you differentiate yourself from them?” Great again because it shows you prepared and have an interest in the company.

Almost everyone asks about the tech stack we use. But some follow that up by asking why we chose that tech stack, are we happy with it, do we think we’ll be changing it, and why / why not? That shows interest.

Sometimes I get quirky questions like, “tell me one fact about the company that I couldn’t find on Google.” I actually had fun answering that one, but it didn’t particularly do anything about my feelings for the candidate. It was just a gimmicky question and it felt like it came from some article like “10 quirky questions to ask to nail that job interview.”

I won’t give any more examples, as this is not a list of questions to ask article.

Summary

A huge part of passing a screening interview is showing interest in the company, interest in the job, interest in your career, interest in your previous work. The more interest you show, the more the interviewer is going to be interested in you. Well, maybe it’s better to say that the less interest you show, the less interest the interviewer will be interested in you. Hopefully they are starting from yes. Don’t push them towards no.

Skill and experience don’t have much of a part at this stage. I’ve already seen your resume. We’ll do some technical interviews later to see if you actually know how to do what you say you know how to do. Of course, sometimes the resume is inflated and that becomes obvious on the screen, but that is not very common.

Do some research, show some interest. If you aren’t interested, why are you applying for this job anyway?

Yesterday I picked up a book on a writing compilers and interpreters. This particular book’s code is written in Java. It’s been a while since I’ve coded in Java and I had no idea what Java dev tools I had on my system. So I created a simple hello world Java class and ran javac Main.java and java main and got the result I was hoping for. Yay! Then I figured I’d check what version of Java I had installed. So I did what I thought was obvious:

java -v

Unrecognized option. Oh, I know some language uses a capital V instead. Must be Java.

java -V

Nope. OK. I guess I just have to use the long version.

java --version

No luck. All right. We’ll just start going through every possible iteration…

java --Version
java -Version
java -version

Finally! That last one told me I had version 1.8.0_262.

It got me thinking that finding the version of various tools and programs is something you have to do now and then and I rarely get it right on the first try. Some other examples:

gcc --version
node -v
python -V
perl -v
go version
lua -v
rustc --version

Then I got to thinking that it would be pretty easy to write a utility script to capture a bunch of this stuff. Here’s the meat of what I did, just capturing a few of the above examples:

case $1 in
java)
    $1 -version
    ;;

gcc | rustc)
    $1 --version
    ;;

node | perl | lua)
    $1 -v
    ;;

esac

I fleshed it out a bit, added a bunch more programs to it, threw it up on github and tweeted about it. I’ve already had a couple of PRs adding additional tools to it. Hoping to get some more. As of this writing, it can recognize 36 different programs. It checks to see if you have the program installed at all before trying to find its version, and displays a message if it doesn’t yet know about the program you are checking. Also supports a -h version for help, -c to display the count of how many programs it recognizes, and of course -v for displaying its own version.

And yes, it can be used to check its own version “recursively”!

version version

If it sounds useful, grab it here:

https://github.com/bit101/version

Just put the version script somewhere in your path and you should be good to go. You can add whatever other tools you use to pretty easily. If you do, I’d love to know about them, either through a PR or just let me know the tool and how you find the version.

I’ve only actually tested it on a couple of Linux machines. It should work on Mac as well, but I’ve got to put in the time to test it later today.

Note 1: You can spell it “resume”, “resumé” or “résumé”. I’m going to go accent-less.

Note 2: This article represents my own views and experiences and is no way meant to represent the views, policies or practices of my company.

Intro

My company, Notarize.com, found itself well positioned in an environment where suddenly people want to do transactions on line rather than in person. Our traffic and business has increased massively in the past few months and we’ve attracted the attention of a lot of big companies that want to work with us. We’re building all kinds of new things to accommodate this new surge and we need new engineers.

Thus, I’ve been interviewing a lot of candidates lately, and looking at hundreds and hundreds of resumes. You may have heard things about how hiring managers spend so many seconds looking at a resume before making a decision. I’m here to tell you that this is absolutely true. When you have 30 resumes to get through and you have a half hour between meetings with plenty of other projects vying for that time, you learn to judge a resume quickly.

I know there are plenty of people out there on the other end of this process, so I wanted to share some of what I go through, and maybe it will help you in your job search. I hope that none of the examples come off as too demeaning, snarky or fun-poking. I’m just trying to point out some pitfalls to avoid and give you examples of why certain things are really bad.

First let me say that there is no magic resume trick that will guarantee you an interview. And there isn’t some special specific thing that all hiring personnel are looking for in a resume. What I’m looking for is a person who fits the qualifications we are looking for. That is obviously going to be different from company to company, and is even going to vary at different periods within a single company. Sometimes I might be looking for a senior engineer to fill a particular role. Other times I might be fine with hiring a more junior person or even someone right out of school. In the past we were only looking for local candidates in Boston. Now we are totally open to remote engineers.

So, while there is no magic trick that will automatically get your foot in the door, there are plenty of things you can do wrong that will annoy the person looking at your resume and get it rejected even though you might actually be a good fit.

Hiring managers are looking for specific things

When someone is looking at a resume, there’s a list of things they are trying to find out right off the bat to see if you are someone they should interview. If they can find that information quickly and easily, then they can make an informed, logical decision. If they can’t find that info, they’re going to start making guesses. And since you just made their job just a little bit harder, there’s a good chance they’re going to be just a little bit biased against you when they start making those guesses.

So rule number one of writing a resume is:

Don’t make the reviewer guess about anything. Make it easy for them to find out what they are looking for.

I swear to you, when I read a resume that gives me all the info I need up front, I silently thank the candidate. In fact, if I’m alone in the room I might even verbally thank them. I may not decide to interview them because they may not fit what I’m looking for in this round. But… if they fall into that maybe category, the fact that they made my job easy will nudge me towards bringing them in.

So, what am I looking for? Obviously, this will be different for different companies and different hiring managers, but I’ll tell you what it is for me. And it’s surprisingly little. Remember, I’m trying to get through it as quickly as possible.

1. Where are you located?

I don’t need to know your full address, or even necessarily your city. But are you local? In a different time zone? In a different country? Back when we were only looking for local candidates, this was a huge annoyance. It’s shocking how many people don’t put any kind of location at all on their resume. Sometimes you can get a hint by their phone area code if they give it, or the location of their previous jobs, but in the end, you are left making a guess. If I absolutely have to hire a local candidate, am I going to schedule a 30 minute screening call with you to find out where you live? Chances are I’m going to guess you’re not local and move on.

As I said, currently we are hiring remote engineers, but I still want to know roughly where you live. And I can only hire people who live in the US, so I really need to know at least that much.

2. What is your work history?

Where do you work now, or where was your last job? How long did you work there? What was your role there? What did you work with and what technologies did you use? And the same for your last few relevant jobs. This can be really brief.

Big Mega Corp, Senior Software Engineer, Jan 2017 – Present
Developed and maintained features on the Big Mega site and web apps. Used React, Typescript, GraphQL and Apollo. Was the tech lead for a team of 5 engineers.

This is beautiful. It tells me everything I need to know. You might want to pad it out a little bit, but not a whole lot more than that. Don’t list every thing you ever did over the whole time you worked for the company. Nobody’s going to read all that.

If you have any major holes in your work history, it’s nice to account for them. Not a deal breaker, but someone’s going to ask you eventually, so you should have an answer ready.

If you’ve held at least one or two jobs that are relevant to the position you are applying for, only list those relevant jobs. I really don’t care about your cashier or security guard or dog walking experience if you are already an experienced software developer. If you are straight out of school and are looking for your first role in a new career, then, yeah, list other jobs you’ve had that show you can actually hold a job and haven’t just been leeching off your parents for your entire life. 🙂

3. What technologies do you know?

Somewhere in a sidebar or something, list the technologies that you are experienced with. Keep this high level and don’t get too hung up on any kind of experience rating system. If I’m looking for someone who knows Ruby on Rails and right there at the top of the list is Ruby on Rails, you’re getting an interview (assuming everything else listed here checks out).

If Rails is two-thirds down a list of 87 different technologies, programs, platforms, languages, tools and frameworks, I’m going to think, “They don’t really know Rails. They just used it once.”

Of course, don’t lie. You’re going to get caught. And you won’t get the job.

DON’T make this a wall of acronyms. A dozen or so high level items is great. Languages, frameworks, high level technologies. “React, GraphQL, Apollo, TypsScript, Ruby on Rails, Postgres SQL, Redis, AWS, Heroku” and you’ve won me over. I don’t need to know what editor or IDE or shell you use, or what OSes you like or what phone you use. I don’t care that you have used Microsoft Office or Photoshop or Gmail, Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer 9. I saw a resume recently that listed every CSS property the person had experience with. Literally. It was several lines of, “CSS color, CSS fonts, CSS padding, CSS margins, CSS borders, CSS spacing, …”. Don’t do that.

4. What education do you have?

To be honest, if a candidate has more than a couple of years of experience in the field, I personally don’t pay much attention at all to their education. Of course some companies require degrees, and other hiring managers might be more hung up on this, so you should definitely put it down, but IMO it should come below any relevant job experience.

I’ve seen some candidates with 10-20 or more years of engineering experience listing their GPA, dean’s list status, academic achievements, from the 1990s. Totally irrelevant as far as I’m concerned.

If you are right out of school and looking for an entry level position, that’s a whole different story. In that case, your education is one of your big selling points, along with any personal and school projects and internships and coops you might have done.

5. What is your work authorization status?

This is a sensitive one because it can start to get mixed up with bias and exclusion and discrimination. But the bottom line is, a company needs to know that it can legally hire you.

If you’re a citizen or have a green card or some kind of visa that means you can start work tomorrow, let them know that up front. If you need visa sponsorship or transfer, that’s also important. Some companies may not be able to accommodate that, but hiding that fact and bringing it up at the last minute isn’t going to change that situation.

Other tips

Show, don’t tell.

“I’m a fast learner, a hard worker, super responsible and get along great with people.” This is like a sign that says, “Best pizza in NY!” Everyone says it and everyone reading it ignores it. Show what you can in your experience section, and the rest should come out in the interview. I’m not saying don’t talk positively about yourself, but don’t go overboard and don’t really expect it to have much of an impact.

Don’t exaggerate.

A pet peeve of mine is candidates who list multiple “CEO”, “CTO”, “Founder” roles on their resumes. And when you dig into it, you find out that this means they published a couple of mobile apps with a friend when they were in college.

If I’m hiring a junior software developer, your “CEO” experience is irrelevant. If you’re positioning yourself as a CTO, why are you applying for a developer position? This isn’t to say I don’t want to know about these kinds of projects. They are cool and very relevant. Just don’t try to impress me with inflated titles.

How long?

A really complete resume that answers all my questions and is one page long is a thing of beauty. But in reality, it’s often tough to get everything in to a single page without cramping it. Especially if you do have several jobs worth of experiences. I don’t have any problem at all with two-pagers. But more than that is too much. I had one resume come in a while back where page one was a table of contents to the other 8 pages. I kid you not. Guess how much of that I actually read. About 20% of the first page. Maybe.

Summary

Again it’s all about answering the things the hiring manager needs to know to determine if you are a fit or not.

If you are not a fit, you are not going to get the job. Period. You can hide things and obfuscate and misdirect. But all that is probably not going to help you get an interview. And if it does, you’re still not going to get the job. Because you’re not a fit.

If you are a fit, making your resume clear and answering those questions right up front is the best way to get in the door.

After upgrading my 2011 desktop recently with a new CPU and RAM, I caught the PC building bug and started wanting to build a whole new machine. My initial plans were to take it slow. But there’s only so much I can do there. If I got a modern motherboard, my existing CPU and RAM isn’t going to work, so those three need to be done at once. But I figured I could start with a case anyway.

I went with Phanteks Enthoo Pro.

A few things I was looking for that influenced my decision:

1. Plenty of space for internal storage. I boot from an SSD, but have my home directory on a 3.5″ HDD, with another one for backup, and yet another for dual booting Windows. And I’d like to have the option to add more if I want to set up a RAID down the line.
2. Front bays. I do use a CD/DVD drive regularly and want to have the option for other front bay add-ons in the future.
3. Good cable management. In my 2011 build, I paid no attention to this at all and getting to the RAM was like pushing your way through an overgrown jungle. I cleaned it up a bit during the recent upgrades, but wanted to make it as clean as possible this time.

The Phanteks case excels in all these areas. It has 6 internal 3.5″ bays, with the clip-and-slide mounting slots. These come in two cages of three bays each.

It also has three front bays. The top one you see in the photo is actually a preinstalled front panel bay that pivots open. It’s got 2 USB 3 and 2 USB 2 ports, audio jacks, reset and LED buttons. Then three open bays below that.

I watched a few YouTube video reviews of this case and everyone raved about the cable management. Lots of grommeted pass-through holes to the back space, which has something like an inch of space for cables, and pre-installed velcro strips all over the place. Really really nice.

Also… this case is GIGANTIC. I didn’t realize how big it was till I got it and opened it up. Not a problem for me, but I was definitely surprised. It’s cavernous inside. But I like it a lot. A real quality build and only just over $100. So a really good buy. Very satisfied.

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The case came in mid week a couple of weeks ago, so I was planning to move my existing build into it over the weekend. Then, over the coming months I’d do some research, shop around and look for some good deals on a motherboard, CPU and RAM.

Then, my wife saw the new case and said, “Cool! You should get the rest of the stuff now and just build it.” You don’t ask twice about an offer like that.

Years ago I was very much an AMD guy. I went Intel with my 2011 build (not sure why) and all the laptops I’ve had since then have been Intels. But I figured this would be a good time to go back to AMD. It took a bit of research to figure out what chips were compatible with what motherboards and figure out a good price/value combination on everything.

As it turned out, I came into this project at a really good time. The much anticipated new AMD 550 series boards just came out recently. And in fact were hard to get for a while. People had preordered the first round and there were waiting lists for the next available ones. It seems like I came in just at they were all back in stock.

With the giant case I had, there was no way I wasn’t going with a full size ATX board. After looking around, I went with the ASRock B550 PRO4 AM4. It seemed like a good value without going crazy on cost.

And got a Ryzen 5 3600 to go with it. The price on these dropped about $20 from the time I was first looking at them to when I pushed the button, so I lucked out there. Could have spent an extra $50 on the 3600X but I think this will suit my needs just fine.

And 2x8GB sticks of G.Skill Ripjaws DDR4 RAM. This starts me out with 16GB and leaves two slots open for expansion.

While I was at it, I added a TP-Link Wifi card to get some better reception up in the office. Better than the stupid USB Wifi dongle I was using.

Everything but the motherboard arrived one day a couple of weeks ago. But the mobo was way slower, so I had to spend last weekend just staring at everything.

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Actually, I did install the wifi card in my existing desktop and it was so much better. One of my wife’s desktops (yes, one of her desktops) was also using one of those USB dongles so I decided to give her an upgrade. I decided to get an upgraded model with external antennas (and bluetooth) for my final build and give her the one I just bought.

Finally the Build!

Last week, the motherboard finally arrived. I had some plans for that night, but those got cancelled and I started building!

Just going to give you a giant dump of all the photos here.

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This all went really well and was a lot of fun. The case set up and cable management features are very nice. What you can only partially see in some of those photos is that there are two SSD / 2.5″ HDD mounting brackets in the front. I have my root SSD and one extra 500GB HDD mounted there. There are even two more brackets in the cable management space. I might end up moving them back there at some point. I thought it would look neat to have them up front, but … not so much.

The Moment of Truth

Now came the scary part. I have a fairly complex setup. As I said, I boot off an SDD, with a 2TB HDD for my home folder on Linux, another 2TB HDD for backups, another 1GB HDD for dual booting Windows, and this other 2.5″ HDD that I just had lying around.

I plugged the boot/root SSD into SATA port 1, but I was fairly certain that I was going to have to go into the bios and mess around with boot options. And I figured it was even money that I was going to have to re-install one or both OSes to have them work right. But you never know till you hit the switch.

It powered up and went right into my grub OS selection screen. WTF. I chose Manjaro (Linux) and it booted up. I logged in and everything worked perfectly, like nothing at all had changed (other than being noticeably more performant).

OK… reboot and choose Windows…

Windows of course had to do some extra hardware setup and reboot one more time, but then it was working. I then had to manually install the drivers for the new wifi card, but that went well. And now both OSes are totally functional.

I do get some IRQ warnings that weren’t there before when I boot into Linux. But they just flash on for a second and then it boots fine. I’ll dig into that this coming week.

A few follow up items. One is that I was unable to get a SATA power cable up to the optical drive. Just because the case is so cavernous. So today I went and got a molex to 2x SATA converter and that works fine.

Also, everything is a bit dark in there.

In this photo, I’m actually shining a flashlight in there! So I have a couple strips of addressable RGB lighting on order. But I also picked up an RGB fan and stuck it in one of the roof slots today. The effect is subtle in daylight, but should look nice at night.

The motherboard has two RGB LED headers as well as two addressable RGB LED headers. It also has some on-board LEDs. ASRock has Windows software for setting up the different modes on all the different RGB lighting devices you can cram in there. There are some hacky Linux solutions that I’m going to avoid for now. I just set it up in Windows and the settings get saved and continue to function when you boot into Linux, so that’s fine. I have it set on a slow rainbow cycle.

And the case itself has some RGB LED headers with a button in the front panel to turn them on and off and cycle through effect modes. I might try that out when the new strips come in.

So, all in all, it went really, really well and I’m very happy with this build. In Windows I was able to jump into Steam and continue my progress through the Halo Master Chief Collection right where I left off. Linux all works perfectly too. I don’t think I’ve experienced a crash or major glitch yet. Core temperature is high 30s / low 40s when idle, which is a bit higher than my older Intel chip, but I understand that Ryzens run somewhat hotter.

Up Next

I got that extra lighting coming in some time this week, and might want to get a more powerful CPU cooler. Definitely not going with liquid cooling though. More hassle than it’s worth for my use cases.

And now I have my old case with the upgraded motherboard, CPU and RAM to think about. It’s a perfectly good system. I’ll need a new power supply and graphics card and possibly some more storage and yet another wifi card because all that stuff went into the new build. Not sure what I’ll do for an OS on that or what I’ll even use it for. But I can’t let it go to waste.