Everyone else getting a 500 level error? Is this a Mastodon issue?
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> Anders Borsch (@anders@mastodon.cyborch.com)
I have interviewed 100s of candidates for software engineering positions.
I’ve done take-home tests, in person challenges, pair programming with the candidates.
All of them were awful experiences for me and especially for the candidate.
I can only think of a single instance where a code challenge exposed a poor software engineer and I could definitely have made the same assessment just by talking to them.
Lately I’ve stopped doing any software or mental puzzles.
I don’t do any of that when I interview designers or QA people or HR people, so why would I be particularly toxic towards software engineers during the hiring process?
Instead, I actually read their resumes (which is significantly quicker than doing interviews, asking them to repeat the same information), and then I ask them questions like:
- Where do you get your tech news?
- How do you learn about new technologies?
- What do you most appreciate in your coworkers today?
- What is a perfect workday like for you?
I specifically avoid trap-style questions like “what is your greatest weakness?” or “why are you leaving your current job?”
I recommend that you make a plan for what you want to learn about the candidate, e.g. “are they good at acquiring new skills?” or “do they share the same values as the team?” and then structure the interview around that.
Be a non-toxic manager. Make your company look good during the interview process. Get better candidates.
Modern Wordpress hosts do both, and it's usually very very quick to load.
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/run-your-own/
Many people run theirs on a small VPS, raspberry pi, etc. and there are a number of 'paid hosting' providers for Mastodon servers too.
In practice, this all means yes: unlike a blog, it is a complex web application, and caching and whether a CDN is in use are up to the person hosting it.
Mastodon can also be fairly expensive to run, depending on how many images/videos people upload, traffic they bring to the instance, etc.
But basically, it's an essential part of a modern Wordpress stack (lol, what an oxymoron, I know), not an afterthought. It's not something a lone-wolf admin using a generic Varnish/Nginx config should do, but part of a large a community-driven effort to improve Wordpress performance. These plugins are very well integrated into the Wordpress base system and cache many parts of it.
This isn't so much to defend Wordpress (whose ancient architecture requires the use of these techniques), but to express surprise that a modern software like Mastodon doesn't have this built-in.
In hindsight, I should have used an indirect link via mastodon.social or something, apologies.