I wouldn't work at any place that asked me to do a coding "assignment", ie work for free.

Hope you know the **** out of your javascript array methods.

Guaranteed to be at least one class-based vs. prototype-based inheritance question.

Eh at this point I'll gladly take it over an in-person test - because I can take my time and it will help me much more to shake the rust off.

At a place I used to work we would hire candidates who made it past the first couple rounds of interviews (I forget exactly, but late in the process) for a 20 hour project as a test, but it wasn't as much of a coding test as a problem solving test, I would say. We would ask them to document how they worked through the problem given as well as the code, and they would work in a copy of one of our repos.

There were NDAs and all that, so there's a lot of overhead, but as far as feeling confident in someone's technical ability I really liked that approach. Although I would, since it was my idea and I put together the test projects :P And I didn't have to deal with the overhead or the potential problems. It solves your "working for free" issue though.

Yeah this is a great solution imo - tests the thing you're actually gonna do on the job. Although I can see how you might lose great candidates who refuse to play ball.

I don't think we ever noticed anyone balking at that request specifically, but there's obviously some real costs to doing it that way. I have no idea if it's at all realistic for most companies. It worked for that one team at that one company for several years, and I liked it. I think I would also prefer it as a candidate over some of the alternatives, but that's just me.

The problem with the 20 hour paid project approach is that I don't think I would be allowed to complete that project by my current employer.

I'm really enjoying this talk about premature optimization. Interesting take on data structures starting about minute 12.

I'm not sure that I agree that data structures are only about optimization. I agree that the choice of data structure will be profoundly important to performance, but I also think that data structures are equally about conceptual clarity, which I think is pretty important.

Although I think I would agree that there's often more flexibility to use different data structures with similar conceptual clarity than there is when you're choosing data structures for performance.

It's funny though, one of the things I like a lot about javascript is that it makes it easy to just use arrays and hashes for everything, and think about the organization of data more than the algorithmic complexity or performance. I think that's to his point, and I think it's a valid point.

Yeah, python has a bunch of other special data structures, like deques and namedtuples and stuff. The only thing I really find myself using much are defaultdicts, which are basically hashmaps that have definable default values. So instead of

you can do

and so forth.

Stacks come in handy sometimes.

Sure but most list/array types natively support push and pop, so are already stacks

I used a stack recently

Maybe I'm thinking of when I was still doing Java. There was something where I needed LIFO.

I remember now, it was a stack of views in an MVC framework (Sencha Touch). The max stack size was set to 10, so if the user starts going back->back->back, the framework would pop the top one of the stack and be able to instantly load up to 10 views which were sitting in resident memory. After that it would have to reload the views from the url.

I think.

We did a similar thing with our channel guide in angular. It's 2 weeks (14 * 48 thirty minute blocks) by 600 channels - so there's no way you could load it all in resident memory. We would "light up" blocks near what the user was surfing - then drop the oldest blocks out of the memory structure if it got too full. The # of blocks to stay in memory was configurable and varied by device.

I don't really care about this job anyway. So tomorrow as soon as I get the questions I will post them here and we'll have fun with it. Should be about 3pm PDT.

Use it as a practice/training activity, prepare anyway, do your best. I would ask them when they are planning to make a decision before I went though. Posting the coding challenges could get you some some valuable feedback, kind of a team effort. Shows your willingness to work in a team environment.

FWIW it is still amazing to me how some places can let projects go on and on where obviously the projects are way late and way over budget while not changing anything in their development processes. The development processes thst brought about the disaster. To me it provides a lot of insight into the hiring processes companies use and their reluctance to adapt.

it seems like performance is closely tied with understanding databases. the changes i have seen where something gets instantly 5-20x faster, is from a database optimization.

Holy **** someone is still using EBJs?

Oh good - now I have a Netflix coderpad session from 2 to 2:45. Should be a fun afternoon.

GL.

In other exciting news I have to go to Bangalore for 2 weeks in September. Wonderful.

I didn't go to Bangalore but I went all around there. The coolest/hottest chicks seemed to be from Bangalore FWIW. Also loosest - as in you might get some making out and maybe even heavy petting in before marriage.

From what they said it sounds like it actually has a pretty modern vibe and decent nightlife compared to the rest of the area.

I'll be sure to let the wife know how far indian girls will let me get.

Do you have any time for sightseeing? There’s some cool stuff around there.