Each avatar has 3 layers: background, foreground (head), and text (single letter).
The background code chooses from one of the background SVGs (gradients in different directions with color placeholders) and then selects colors to put into the SVG. The whole things is meant to be easy to extend to fit your needs.
My understanding with Gravatar is that your email is hashed in order to select an avatar you have already uploaded, but is not used in customizing the avatar. Is that right?
What did you have in mind?
Also, what error do you get on Magicell? There are some geo-restrictions in place, so I am curious what you saw. Thanks!
IIRC Gravatar has an option to generate a default image if you didn't upload your own avatar. Imagine that the the has was 89A3 then the image was a 2x2 square with colors 8, 9, A and 3; using some number2rgb function so it was green, yellow, white and red or something like that. I'm making up the details! And they used other shapes and more than 4 parts, but I hope my description is good enough. I found some nice discussion with the details of the real implementation in https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17443/how-is-the-de...
A few years ago it was popular to make Gravatar "clones". One generate weird robots instead of geometric shapes. Another generated aliens. ...
In Magicell I get "403 Forbidden", I'm in Argentina.
I was thinking perhaps something in the browser's WebRTC stack might have some kind of voice isolation in it for video conferencing too. I'll investigate.
How do you do at other parts of the interview? The background interview where you talk about a technical project from your past, or the behavioral interview where you talk about situations you have been in before and how you reacted?
If you are feeling confident after those, and it is just the live-coding session, I'd suggest being upfront about it and asking for a different type of assessment. Ask for a take home assignment, or ask to be left alone to complete the task, and then review the code with the interviewer where you can explain all of the tradeoffs you made and why. The better companies are open to making accommodations for candidates, so if they are not open to this, that is a sign of how rigged the thinking at that company may be.
On the other hand, if you are struggling with the other interview types as well, you may need to dip into some psychological tricks to get your head in the right mindset. One counter-intuitive thing to do is to tell yourself that you do not want this job. If you can convince yourself to believe that, it will lower the pressure you may be putting on yourself and open you mind to think more clearly.
Thanks for your reply, funnily enough the system design / previous project portions of interviews usually go much better for me. This last interview I did I got a very high score on the system design conversation but failed the coding portion miserably.
I’m not sure why that is the case for me, it’s almost like because it’s supposed to be more of a conversation I loosen up more instead of what I usually get during my live coding interviews which is “here is the link, good luck!” then silence from the interviewer for 45 min.
I have observed in the past that I’m worried about not communicating enough and communicating too much during the live coding portions, so that is definitely an extra hoop to jump through that’s hard for me to not think about during the interview
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