HollyKing's Journal

Last night hollyqueen and I went to see Underneath the Lintel at the Portland Center for the Performing Arts (PCPA). I highly recommend the show. A very good performance of a very interesting play.

This morning I went for an interview at Qualcomm. I nailed that interview. The first 90 minutes involved design questions and methodology. I was very nervous about this part because while I have designed more than one system I've never done it as part of my job. Most places skip the design and jump right into the coding. (A bad move in my opinion, btw.) I feel very good about that part. I could tell that my design ideas were inline with what the interviewer wanted and I even contributed a few new ideas. The second half was all about coding skills. This interviewer started with simple questions and we ended up writing template functors in C++ and function generators in Perl.

The best part was when he asked me about my favorite algorithm. That's an easy one... One time (in band camp) I designed an algorithm to compress and decompress data. No big deal you say? Well, it wasn't a great compression scheme, the neat trick was the decompression step only required one buffer and kept all the variables in registers. I don't recommend that for everyone but in this situation is was just what the doctor ordered. Only needing one buffer cut the memory requirements in half and keeping all the variables in registers made the damn thing fast as hell. We talked about the problem with compression and how to handle a block of data that can't be compressed. Then we went on a tangent about compression schemes and how you can get better results if you adapt the scheme to the data. For example, when compressing a dictionary of words you can get better performance by treating prefixes and suffixes as symbols and not just each letter as a symbol.

Most of the work is in C# but they didn't ask me about any of that. They said they would teach me what I needed to know and that they were more interested in my skills and abilities than any particular language syntax. Well, I hope they call, because it sounds like an interesting place to work.