Web Developer / Blog

Just over a year ago my wife and I decided that we’d consider moving from Cincinnati to Silicon Valley.  I’ve always found it difficult to find work that I enjoyed in Cincinnati.  That resulted in me being involved in two startups, neither being successful :).  As part of the process my friends who were also considering moving and I documented the questions we were asked during interviews.

O’Reilly (in person):

• Create a Perl dictionary in Python.

Google (phone):

• What is a sticky bit?
• How do you display all available information for an inode?
• What is the default switch for kill?

Gaia Online (in person):

• Write pseudocode which determines if a move is legal in reversi.
• Write a regular expression to convert this UBB code into valid HTML: The dog [b]ran over [i]the street[/b] and said: [blockquote]i am a dog[/blockquote].
• Questions regarding what I did to help scale software at Photagious and ClearChannel.

Rearden Commerce (in person):

• What is the architecture where you currently work and what are some of the bottlenecks?
• How do you go about solving a performance problem?
• Can a computer process two things at the same time?
• How would you implement support for multiple languages in a web application?
• How would you remove all of the sequential characters from the following string: AADBDDDABDDEAAD?
• How would you speed up the performance of Javascript?
• How would you speed up the performance of CSS?

Yahoo! (in person):
Group 1

• What does the gnu top program do?
• What does the gnu find program do?
• What is the difference between a thread and a process?
• What version control software have you used?
• Why would you use git over subversion?
• What is a hash datatype?
• What is a super class or parent class?
• Explain prototype in Javascript.
• What character encoding does Javascript use?
• What methods are supported by HTTP?
• When wouldn’t you use an MD5 hash?
• How would you approach writing an similar hashing algorithm to MD5?
• What is a CSS sprite?

Group 2

• Given a 2 dimensional array write pseudocode which sorts the array by the 2nd dimension.
• How would you replicate the PHP extract function?

Group 3

• How would you efficiently pull out links to MP from an HTML file?
• Can you avoid cross site scripting (XSS) with ajax calls?  If so, how?

Group 4

• Given n points in the form (x1, y1, z1)…..(xn, yn, zn), find the k closest points to the origin.
• Given the same points as above, find the K closest points to each other.
• Given a url such as http://yahoo.com/foo/bar/../baz/./abc/foo/def/../ghi, determine the final directory being requested by parsing the string.
• Given the following set of numbers: 10, 7, 5, 8 find all pairs which add up to 15.

Once it was all said and done, we all ended up out here in sunny California.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 11:48 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.