Tools Archives : Global Nerdy

Interviews, even for people who appear onstage often, are still stressful. It often helps to have some prepared notes handy so you can spend more brainpower on the actual interview and less brainpower on remembering things. Pictured above is page one of a three-page set of notes from a recent interview; I can share this one because it’s generic enough that it didn’t need too much redacting.

I strongly recommend that if time allows, write your interview notes by hand instead of typing them. Here are my reasons why:

Writing by hand buys you extra time to think. The slow, deliberate process of writing something down gives you an opportunity to think about things, including what the interviewer might be looking for, and what you might what to say or emphasize during the interview. I often come up with an interesting new angle or idea, thanks to the extra time writing requires.
Writing by hand helps you remember what you wrote. Again, it’s about the process being deliberate: writing by hand requires you to use your fine motor control to form letters, and forming letters is different for each letter — you use a different set of motions to write “b” than you do when writing “M”. Typing uses a similar motion for write different letters; the only difference is their location on the keyboard. Writing those letters engages more “muscle memory” than typing, which “locks in” those facts better.
Writing by hand requires you to pay attention to what you’re writing. Audrey van der Meer, Brain researcher and Professor of Neuropsychology at NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), says this about typing to ake notes in class: “It’s very tempting to type down everything that the lecturer is saying. It kind of goes in through your ears and comes out through your fingertips, but you don’t process the incoming information.” I find the same is true for taking down pre-interview notes.

For the longest time, I’d been using iTerm2 as my terminal app on the Mac, but switched to Warp a couple of years ago. Its smart completions and IDE-like editing are incredibly useful features, but the thing that really makes it stand apart is the AI assistance.

Here’s a recent example. I’m more familiar with mobile and Python frameworks than I am with JavaScript and TypeScript ones, so I never know how to launch a JS/TS application when the developer hasn’t provided a README.

Normally, I’d start poking around the filesystem, looking at config files and other artifacts and doing some Googling to see which framework they belonged to. But this time, I decided “Why not let the AI do the scut work?” So that’s what I did.

I opened a new tab in Warp and entered:

Okay, Warp, I'm in a directory of an application written in
JavaScript (or possibly TypeScript), and need to run it. 
But I don't know which framework it uses, and there are more 
of them than there are Pokemon. Help me run whatever this 
thing is, please.

It replied with:

First, let's check for common configuration files that will 
tell us what kind of JavaScript/TypeScript application 
this is. Looking for package.json, angular.json, 
vue.config.js, or other framework-specific files.

It then asked for permission to execute the command ls -la, which I deemed as harmless (directory listing, long format, all files).

Warp responded with:

I can see this is a Next.js application (due to the presence 
of .next directory, next.config.mjs, and next-env.d.ts). 
It's using Yarn as the package manager (yarn.lock present). 
Let me check the package.json to see what scripts are 
available to run the application.

It asked for permission to do something again — this time, to execute cat package.json (print out, or conCATenate the contents of the file package.jsonso that it could read it. I gave my approval, and it responded with the steps necessary to run the application:

Features like this are why I use Warp and other AI tools!

Right now, Warp is available for macOS, as well as Debian, Fedora, Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu flavors of Linux. They’re working on a Windows version too.