Mike Pinkowish

Skier, College Student, Web Developer, And Much More

How to Prepare for Phone Interviews

February 24, 2010

Phone interviews are tough, especially for software engineering, user interface, and other tech positions. Background noise on either end, shoddy audio quality, and just the fact that you’re not sitting face-to-face with your interviewer make for a trying experience.  Having gone through a bunch of phone interviews (4 with Google and 2 with Facebook) [...]

Pulse of the Planet

February 6, 2010

Pulse of the Planet is a project of mine to visualize tweets in real-time on a map.  It’s powered by Google’s App Engine (Python) and uses the Twitter Search API and Google’s Maps (v3) and Geocoder API.
Besides looking cool, Pulse offers a way to visualize local trends and how many people talk about different subjects. [...]

Sensation and Perception Experiments

January 4, 2010

This fall, I took a psych class, Sensation and Perception, with Brett Fajen.  The class focused on how our perceptions of the world (primarily through the vision system) are formed and altered.  One part of the course involved designing and conducting experiments to measure the abilities and find the limits of human perception.
I designed two [...]

Photography

September 15, 2009

Since my grandma bought me my first point shoot camera upon my graduation from 8th grade in 2003, I’ve had an interested in photography.  Even though I was only 14, the notion of being able to capture a moment with the click of button struck me as special.
I took a bunch of photos (most of [...]