Mar 7, 2011

Interview Skills – Tell Me About Yourself


Do you know why Tell me about yourself question is asked so often in most job interviews? This question is actually an ice-breaker. Asking this question starts the conversation. So you should better be ready with an answer. This question gives the interviewer a chance to know about the interviewee. Once you start talking about yourself, interviewer starts preparing his/her next question. So there are high chances that the next question that would be fired on you will be based on the answer of this question. As the answer for this will be based on you, you think and prepare it before the interview.
While preparing for the answer consider including following points.
1. You:
Tell them your name and which place you are from. Suppose you are “Sri Charan”, then do not start with “Myself Sri Charan”; start with “I am Sri Charan”. This is a very common mistake. Not acceptable in interviews especially in call center jobs.
You may talk about your family (cover up in short); you may talk about your how you came to the city, etc.
2. Your education:
Tell them about your education i.e. graduation/post-graduation. If you are a fresher then tell them the grades you got. If you have done something different than others then tell them. It surely adds a value!
3. Your experience:
Talk about your whole experience. Start from early years and gradually come to recent years. If you have a long experience then you must not be doing same thing all years. Then exactly what you were doing? This is what your interviewer wants to listen. If you are a fresher then talk about your projects and emphasize your role you played in it.
4. Your experience regarding to the post you has applied for:
Fresh candidates who do not have any kind of experience, you should show some positive attitude and exhibit willingness to learn and do new things. Be ready to do new things. Don’t worry that you will make mistakes. Fresher candidates are expected to do mistakes and your employers are well aware of it so you don’t have any reason to be afraid. Believe me no one will give you more work than you can handle.
5. Do not describe your salary or pay scale at this point of time (unless explicitly asked).
6. Avoid giving unnecessary details. Value your interviewer’s time.
7. The idle answer should not last more than 1 minute.
Good luck.

Feb 27, 2011

IntelliJ IDE To Provide Full Java 7 Support


JetBrains, the Prague-based creator of code-centric Java IDE IntelliJ IDEA, this week took the wraps off the upcoming version of its flagship development environment. According to the company, the major focus of IntelliJ 10.5 will be Java 7 support.
"All of the new language features will be fully supported across the product, with code completion, code inspections, quick fixes and so on," the company said on its "Tips & Tricks" blog. "Of course, we're also working on bug fixes, usability and performance improvements. In particular, in this release we've focused on improving startup performance, so you can expect the new version of IntelliJ IDEA to open and load your projects faster."
The IntelliJ IDEA is one of the relatively few such tools to survive the advent of the Eclipse juggernaut that rolled over the Java IDE market a few years ago. In 2009, the company open sourced the IntelliJ Platform, which provides the underlying APIs for all JetBrains IDEs, including IntelliJ IDEA, RubyMine, Web IDE, and MPS. With version 9.0 of the IDE, the company began offering two editions: Community and Ultimate. The Community Edition is free and available under the Apache 2.0 license; the Ultimate Edition is the commercial version.
Among the stand-out features of this IDE is smart type-aware code completion: The environment "knows" when a coder wants to cast to a type and is aware of run-time type checks, which makes it possible to perform cast and method invocation in a single action.
Among other improvements, version 10 of the IDE added a feature that automatically invokes code completion as the coder types. Version 10.5 comes with improvements to the console for Spring Roo, the Java EE RIA dev tool; integration of the Jetty Java-based HTTP server and servlet container; support for version 2 of XSLT ((Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations); new refactorings for the Java-based Groovy programming language; and support for the Google Chrome web browser in the JavaScript debugger.
The company unveiled the IntelliJ IDEA 10.05 during a celebration of new offices in Munich, Germany. (Snapshots and status updates are available on the company's Facebook page.)
The new version is scheduled for a general availability release this Spring, but the Early Access Preview program starts in a few weeks. The company is inviting anyone interested to download the source code for the IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition from the JetBrains download page here.