Two interviews and Information Technology thoughts

A personal reflection from a former Code for America engineer on two technical interview formats he designed: one based on reading about Cross Domain Referer Leakage and working through a Rails codebase fix, and another around implementing a filter feature end-to-end. The post uses these interviews as a springboard to articulate a philosophy of Information Technology as a data pipeline — reduce, collect, aggregate, enrich, display, and drive decisions — and questions whether AI/generative tools fit that model or represent something fundamentally different (divergent rather than convergent). The author also reflects on how rarely candidates truly understood the broader purpose of what they were building.

Source: https://island94.org/2026/08/two-interviews-and-information-technology-thoughts. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.