http://somanyschemes.com/2008/01/28/8-technologies-that-you-must-know-about-when-going-into-a-technical-startup-interview/


Recently, I was advising a friend about startup interviews and came up with
this list of technologies that you simply must know about when going into a
technical startup interview. You don’t need to be an expert in every one of
these, but I think you should be aware of their existence and their high-level
overview.

So, in no particular order…

   1. Most web applications are database driven, so know about database
scaling and performance. Also: Memcached (distributed memory cache), caching
proxies like squid, and caching techniques in general.
   2. Machine learning and data mining techniques — at least an understanding
of their potential. There is way too much to go into here, but play with the
open source package called Weka. Also check out the excellent introductory,
hands-on book Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran.
   3. Lucene, an open source search engine.
   4. If you’re applying (or working at) an interesting startup, you’ll
probably have large quantities of data to process, so know about Hadoop, the
open source answer to Google’s MapReduce paradigm. Consider in combination
with Amazon’s EC2 (see below).
   5. The Google File System (GFS) and Google’s BigTable. These projects
represent the current cutting-edge in data storage for scalable web
applications. But if you want to use them, you’ll have to join Google or use
one of these projects that offer some (but not all) of their features:
Amazon’s S3 and SimpleDB (see below), MogileFS, Global File System, and
Hadoop’s HDFS file system with HBase acting as BigTable, but HBase may not be
ready for prime-time just yet. There are, of course, other solutions of
varying complexity as well.
   6. Amazon web services: S3 (backups, reliable data store; data archive;
file serving), EC2 (virtualized, scalable utility computing; file processing;
server environments — and you should know something about machine
virtualization in general as well), and to a possibly lesser (and unproven)
extent SimpleDB (scalable database replacement for some types of applications —
you should have experience with MySQL and the SQL language too).
   7. Ruby on Rails — even if you’re not working in Ruby or deploying a Rails
app, Rails is a powerful environment for rapid prototyping and
experimentation, plus a very marketable skill in the current climate.
   8. Almost without saying: the obvious frontend interface technologies of
HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Flash/Flex.

All of the above are fairly language agnostic. You should know a couple of
programming languages quite well, preferably one scripting language (probably
one of Ruby, Perl, Python, or PHP), and one ‘harder’ language such as Java or
C++. Be prepared to write code and answer questions in your chosen languages.

When interviewing at a startup, or any place really, make sure to a) explain
your thoughts when solving problems (don’t just think to yourself for 5
minutes), b) talk about what excites you (technologically and otherwise) and
your awesome side-projects, c) be willing to talk about the flaws as well as
the strengths of technologies, d) know something about the technological area
of the startup, and e) actually know the subjects you proclaim to understand
on your resume.

Everyone is hiring right now (including my employer)! So read up, do some side
projects, and good luck!

What do you think about this list? Please suggest technologies and links that I
missed!