The author’s memory is remarkable. I hardly remember my own name that far back, LOL. Back then, I knew I would always struggle with those types of interviews, so I always carried a floppy disk with me to them. The disk contained a few programs I had written, and I would simply tell the interviewers, “Don’t give me a quiz. I’m terrible at it, so if you do, I’m out.” However, if they were willing to look at my capabilities, I would share a few of my programs. That approach actually worked most of the time and got me the jobs. The good old days!

Memory is a funny thing.

I also take months to learn new names, but I can tell you that my second interview ever was for a company which did low level SCADA work. Even though I never took that job or worked in any such related field I can still tell you what it stands for.

Names disappear instantly, but some oddly specific technical acronym from one interview decades ago gets burned into ROM

I can tell this is from forever ago by floppy disk.

That's an IRL save icon for anyone who's wondering.

3D printed to the finest details, heck it can even store like half a picture.

I fondly recall pirating Strike Commander on 35 floppies, it took quite a few sessions to transfer this since there was quite often some data reading error... good memories, feel like from 5 centuries ago

Yes, but it feels like yesterday...

A small floppy full of actual programs probably said much more about your ability than a whiteboard quiz ever could

Why did that approach change?

Surely the modern equivalent to that is having public git repositories.

Perhaps, but has "I'm not doing your whiteboard challenge - check out my git repositories instead!" ever worked for you?!

Haha, for some reason when phrased like that I get a bad feeling about the outcome of the interview.

I’m not sure if that strategy still works in today’s job market. It might still be, but I’m not the one to answer since I haven’t been on a job interview in quite some time.

I work in embedded systems. I always carry a few (small) projects with me in a backpack with a power supply and bring them out if certain topics allow me to do a show-and-tell.

I also carry a binder. Each page is a one-page description of a project with a color photo of the system and a bulled-point list of all technologies inside. It's a great conversation starter. Hasn't failed me yet.

10 years after I was hired, one of the interviewers still remembered me showing him a small board that I'd designed, even though he was a Windows MFC programmer and didn't know the first thing about microcontrollers.

I've made great hires who had binders just like you described.

Yes, it’s a late addition to that library. The dancing text demo uses the “weighted exclusion” feature of the VMPrint engine, which essentially creates an object composed of horizontal bars. However, the engine also offers another mode that constructs exclusion objects by combining primitive shapes like circles and polygons. This “stick” demo demonstrates that. In doing so, I added a small set of APIs to allow programmatic control over these primitive parts, which essentially turns this into a rudimentary rigging system. I’m uncertain about its practicality in real-world applications, but it was interesting to observe.

I’m glad that you’re trying the Layoutmaster library in your projects. You can also feed it video with a predominantly white background (or any other solid color). Additionally, the video can contain multiple objects, and the algorithm treats them uniformly.

Thank you! This can make it quite easy to create demos like those “dragon swimming through text” animations that became popular recently. I had no idea what other real-world applications we could use it for, but it was fun to be able to do it, LOL.

Thanks for the help and clarification.

It's strange that happened. I had no issue loading it on my iPhone 16e in Safari or Chrome... Could it be somehow your browser prevent Javascript from loading?

I did not make the demo specifically for mobile browsers, but it does work rather well on my iPhone 16e with Safari and Chrome. I also tried it on my Pixel 10 and did not encounter any issues. The library itself is tiny ~250K so it should load right away.

It kills drag scroll over the flow text on my android

LOL sorry my bad. Should have been more specific. It’s a demo of my layout library. The stick figure is made with a few primitives to form a so-called exclusion assembly which causes texts to flow around them. But what’s unique about it is that these primitive parts can be controlled independently via programmatic control. This turns them into a little rig essentially. I thought it was funny and could be even useful so I shared it.

The Web is dead anyway. It never became the movement we dreamed it would: the democratization of information, communication, and expression.

It’s hostile trash. Cloudflare can eat me.

You can use primitive exclusion assemblies to create a rig and programmatically control it to animate a layout in Layoutmaster.

It goes to show that success often has little to do with the quality of one’s work. Ultimately, it all boils down to the circles one belongs to. If you don’t fit in, you don’t even get a chance to showcase your work, whether it’s AI-generated or not.