I recently upgraded to a new system, and instead of running Arch Linux natively I've decided to run it inside VirtualBox on Windows 10. Below I note down the steps I took, which closely follow the excellent wiki pages of archlinux. But along the way, I also noted a few other steps steps I took to make this system very comfortable, which you'll have to figure out for yourself if you like them or not!

I couldn't find a section on the Arch wiki where these steps are listed, perhaps they are obvious, but since I think I know what I'm doing I'm just going off script here (what a great start!).

1. Start VirtualBox and click New
2. Name your machine, preferably with a descriptive but memorable name (e.g., exultant carpenter), select type Linux, and version Arch Linux (64 bit) (unless you downloaded the 32 bit version. A note on this, I recall in the past that for some machi

Joel Hooks - co-founder of egghead.io, education at Vercel, builds badass courses via Skill Recordings (Total TypeScript, Pro Tailwind). Deep background in bootstrapping, systems thinking, and developer education. Lives in the Next.js/React ecosystem daily - RSC, server components, suspense, streaming, caching. Skip the tutorials.

<tool_preferences>

always use beads bd for planning and task management

Reach for tools in this order:

1. Read/Edit - direct file operations over bash cat/sed
2. ast-grep - structural code search over regex grep

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't real

DSA is no longer about solving random sheets or memorizing solutions. It’s about a clear, structured, and realistic approach from absolute beginner to interview-ready Candidate.

• How to start DSA from zero (even if you don’t know coding)
• When to focus on language basics vs DSA
• A 3-phase preparation strategy used by serious engineers
• Exact timelines for topics, patterns, and problem counts
• Why 300–400 problems ≠ success (and what actually matters)