My previous job I got by winning an Xbox Kinect hackathon. Not because the game I made was really good or anything. But because I was the only one who actually built something. (Apart from a guy who’s application would cheer louder as you raised your arms.) So that evening I left the hackathon with an Xbox one and a job.

My job was to build advert games, games whose primary goal is to advertise a company or event. This is the job where I learned I DO NOT like game development. So after about half a year I quit.

Because I still needed money I did some freelance work as a game developer (I developed 3 advert games for 3 startups).

I was still looking around for dev jobs but because I was a student I had no luck, they were all looking for full timers.

At some point I called this one (Dutch) company and spoke to a very odd French person on the phone. He invited me to come over for an interview. I had very little information about the job so I started researching the company. They are a small company specialized in complex content migrations. I wasn’t that into migrations but hell, I’m always up for something new.

Upon arrival I was greeted by the familiar French voice and saw a collection 6 diverse developers sharing a space. We did the usual interview dance and practices and that’s where I figured out this is a java job. They developed tools for the professional services team to perform these complex migrations I mentioned earlier. With me never having touched java before I was quite sure I wouldn’t get the job. But I took the test anyway.

About halfway through the test I was stopped and they started to ask me some conceptual questions, I did okay there but nothing special. That same day the architect took me to their CEO and told him I had:

- very little experience
- no migration experience
- was still a student so could only work 20 hours a week
- he saw some potential they could work with

Quite unexpectedly, they still hired my 20 year old ass.

Now the company has grown to a good 20+ developers with a nicely sized professional services team and we are launching our first out-of-the-box product in a couple of weeks.

So that’s how I got my job. If you read to this very end, my hat is off to you!

This is how my day has gone so far:
1. In car, see advert about hackathon
2. Look it up, see tickets go on sale in 30mins
3. Read more about hackathon, apparently tickets go within minutes
4. Get tickets, print
5. Printer out of ink
6. Accidentally deleted ticket, can't reprint
7. No more tickets left so can't get another
8. Spend hours with data recovery tools
9. Remember recycle bin. Reprint ticket
10. Cry
11. Rant on devRant

the text in the grey-ish rectangles says "Advert"
the text in brackets above the bottom grey-ish rectangle says "(Content continues below advert)"

and yes, the thing in the middle is the actual whole content, there's no continuation below that non-advert

(it's a dictionary showing a very simple word that's just a direct synonym of another very simple one)

How is it that Facebook ads play right before the climax or high point of any video. Just when I'm interested to see what happens next, bam, like clock work, an ad pops up. It does not seem to be a fixed time, but more to do with the specific content of the video. Is it just me or is there some sinister algorithm at work that can detect the moment in a video the viewer will be most interested? so the viewer will have no choice but to sit through the advert to see what happens next. Or is the timing of the ad predetermined by some other means ?