The Story of mozgQ

mozgQ came about when revising and shaprening up for a major job interview. The fundamental problem comes up of "Am I good enough?". How do you actually measure your skills, find where you have gaps, and what you need to put effort into?

At prevoius employers I had created a number of tests across a wide range of subjects to help evaluate interview candidates. They where highly effective and by understanding how candidates aproached problems we where able to choose the best skilled people. Recruitment testing one way or another has become standard in many technical industries with others not far behind.

Another unexpected consequence of creating recruitment tests was that others in the office entertained themselves by trying to work out the answers to the test themselves. It seems smart people like wrapping their brains round interesting challenges!

.... and so the seeds of mozgQ where sown

The aim for mozgQ is to build a public platform for improving your skills in almost any field.

The name?

Yep - it's a bit unusual. As domain names are swamped by squatters anything in English is already long gone. To solve that I turned to the most obscure language I could think of: Nadsat, the fictional language from A Clockwork Orange. In Nadsat mozg = brain, however it turns out that most of Nadsat is derived from Russian, and mozg is straight Russian with no embelishments. As things turned out that domain was already taken so the obvious thing to add to the name was a Q, and there we have mozgQ!

How do you say "mozgQ"

The Q has been deliberately highlighted (for now by upper case) to try and make it more pronouncable. I don't speak Russian, so I can only tell you the way I pronounce it: moz (as in Mozqueto) - (silent "g" - it kind of happens on it's own) - Q!