Zaemis

Interviews are supposed to evaluate whether a candidate can do the job. All too often, though, they become tests of endurance, performance, or obedience. And some of the most common interview questions aren’t just unhelpful, rather lazy, intrusive, and manipulative, reflecting a deeper problem in how companies approach hiring. If we want real insight, we have to ask insightful questions. That sounds obvious, but it’s staggering how many interviews still fall back on shallow or shady lines of questioning. You’ve invested hours wading through half-baked applications, irrelevant referrals, and now AI slop. After all that effort, why would you waste the actual interview, the most valuable moment, with questions that produce rehearsed answers and zero useful insight? Let’s look at four of the worst interview questions to ask, not just to call them out, but to push for a smarter, more respectful way of interviewing that both values people and leads to better hiring decisions. 1. Can you...

The most difficult part of setting up a chroot environment is identifying dependencies for the programs you want to copy to the jail. For example, to make cp available, not only do you need to copy its binary from /bin and any shared libraries it depends on, but the dependencies can have their own dependencies too that need to be copied. The internet suggests using ldd to list a binary’s dependencies, but that has its own problems. The man page for ldd warns not to use the script for untrusted programs because it works by setting a special environment variable and then executes the program. What’s a security-conscious systems administrator to do? The ldd man page recommends objdump as a safe alternative. objdump outputs information about an object file, including what shared libraries it links against. It doesn’t identify the dependencies’ dependencies, but it’s still a good start because it doesn’t try to execute the target file. We can overcome the dependencies of depende...

In preparation for a presentation I’m giving at this month’s Syracuse PHP Users Group meeting, I found the need to read in Unicode characters in PHP one at a time. Unicode is still second-class in PHP; PHP6 failed and we have to fallback to extensions like the mbstring extension and/or libraries like Portable UTF-8 . And even with those, I didn’t see a unicode-capable fgetc() so I wrote my own. Years ago, I wrote a post describing how to read Unicode characters in C , so the logic was already familiar. As a refresher, UTF-8 is a multi-byte encoding scheme capable of representing over 2 million characters using 4 bytes or less. The first 128 characters are encoded the same as 7-bit ASCII with 0 as the most-significant bit. The other characters are encoded using multiple bytes, each byte with 1 as the most-significant bit. The bit pattern in the first byte of a multi-byte sequence tells us how many bytes are needed to represent the character. Here’s what the function looks like: f...

Now that Jump Start MySQL is published, I’m taking advantage of the spare time I have on my hands while it lasts. I’ve helped organize the Syracuse PHP Users Group , reconnected with some old friends, and gave some love to Kiwi , my forever-project programming language. Moreover, I decided to rewrite Kiwi using Go as it’s one of those languages I found interesting but never had a reason to use in any serious fashion. And now that I’ve got some real experience with it, while I still find myself impressed by some of Go’s features, some things have become really annoying. I still really like Go’s data typing; it’s static, but it feels dynamic because the compiler is smart enough to deduce a value’s type. If you write your code well then you’ll rarely see a type name outside of a function signature or struct or interface definition. It’s nice to have type safety without the verbosity (yes I’m looking at you, PHP7). I wish := behaved slightly different, though. Instead of always an allo...

Experience has shown me frameworks can be useful for maintaining structure in large code base developed by multiple teams. Every developer has different abilities and a framework enforces structure and consistency throughout the code. But I've not experienced saving any substantial amount of time on a PHP project because of a framework. The other day someone posted in the PHP subreddit asking for advice. He was about to begin work on a small project and wanted to know whether he should use a framework, and if so then which framework would be appropriate. I should have known better than to offer my two cents but I did anyway. Slim + NotORM + Twig is nice. If it's a simple project, you probably don't need much more than that. I'm not a fan of frameworks in the slightest but I do enjoy the aforementioned combination. They're lightweight and stay out of my way, allowing me to write my functionality. Another redditor picked up on my distaste for frameworks and ask...

Writing can be a fun and rewarding way to share your knowledge, experience, and opinions with others. Unfortunately, it can also be intimidating or frustrating for some people. When I was managing editor for SitePoint's PHPMaster property, I prepared a guide to help alleviate some of the frustration and self-doubt that new writers (and even experienced writers) might experience. The guide wasn't something commissioned by SitePoint; I wrote it on my own for my authors. And though it's been about eight months since PHPMaster was absorbed into the main SitePoint site and I stepped down as managing editor, people continue to ask me about it. So, I've decided to make the guide publicly available. The New Writers Guide offers advice for finding inspiration, structuring an article's content, growing one's self-confidence, and overcoming other challenges that programming writers may face. Hopefully it'll continue to help people write awesome articles and realiz...