The Monday Byte

Welcome to the Monday Byte where I send you 5 things each week so you can improve your English and land a remote dev job.

📖 Word/Phrase - FAANG

Have you seen this acronym? Probably. It stands for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google. It's also used when people say “ex-FAANG” meaning they worked at one of these big companies.

Why does this matter? Well, as you can imagine, it's super difficult to get into one of these companies. They're known for having rigorous interview loops.

But! If you get it, you'll have it on your resume for the rest of your life, which can open many doors. So keep that in mind as you're setting goals for your career.

Many of them do hire globally 🙂 

💬 Pronunciation - 10 Critiques to Learn From

Since I started this newsletter, I've done a total of 10 different critiques including programmers from:

• Argentina

• Brazil

• Mexico

and a few others. I've now organized all of them into a single playlist for you to watch and learn from. Remember, the best thing you can do is identify patterns that make non-native English programmers stick out!

I'll continue adding more critiques over the rest of the year :)

Want me to critique your English? Reply to this and let me know!

🗣️ Real World Conversation - How to Pitch Your Boss on a New Framework

You know how I'm still job hunting? Well during one of my interviews, this programmer mentioned the story of how they started using SvelteKit. Turns out it was his idea.

How? He was bullish on it. It was a greenfield project. And he wrote a slide deck to convince the CTO to use SvelteKit. And guess what?

IT WORKED!

I asked him if he'd share the slide deck with me. I removed all the top-secret stuff so I could share it here with you.

🔗 Content - Mentorship via Free Newsletter

A Staff Engineer at Instagram recently started a newsletter to fill in the gaps of mentorship for other engineers.

I recently subscribed and am a big fan! I know you're probably thinking, “Not another newsletter!” but this one has some goodies.

Check it out here.

💪🏼 Exercise - Practice System Design Problems

One thing I've been doing to prep for my interviews is practicing system design problems. This repo has problems along with solutions. Here's my approach for practicing:

1. Set a timer for 15mins

2. Spend 5mins reading the problem and talking out loud

3. Spend 5mins trying to solve it on your own

4. Spend 5mins reading through the solution

5. Note any sections you struggled with (i.e. databases, caching)

Additionally, practice doing a high-level design using a tool like Excalidraw.

This was extremely helpful with my interviews last week (I even passed my system design interview!)

Bonus: If you need more system design resources, hit reply and let me know! Thinking about putting a guide with all the resources that helped me.

Enjoy the week, we’ll talk again soon.

- Joe