| > i hate to be negative or damning in anyway - you make many valid points. however what you did there is an awful performance imo. i suspect it comes from living in web circles too much. i mean... you used a regex? this is one of the rare cases where i would write a c program with old fashioned procedural logic and expect it to be done much faster and to a higher quality. You were able to come to these conclusions with no knowledge of the content of the data stream, just assumptions? > also yes, good programmers perform very well in unfamiliar environments. I think your definition of "good programmer" is nearing unicorn territory. > not having the api you want is a common real world problem - learning new apis on the fly is a vital developer skill. the idea of an unfamiliar api should neither be daunting or challenging - unless it is of exceptionally poor quality (poor naming, no docs, no samples you must reverse engineer everything - but that shouldn't stop you either). By the sound of it, there was no API here. He was thrown a raw RSS feed and had to figure out what was in it and how to extract the relevant information. > also, i hear a lot about the value of regexes - be careful, this is a web centric view. regexes are a very limited parsing/recognition tool and outside of web development - they go unused for most such problems - they either aren't powerful enough or add a needless layer of complexity in the general case. NLP makes heavy use of regexes for tasks where GLR parsers are overkill or where we have to fix character encoding or other such data noise. > good luck though. given more time and practice you will learn to eat these interviews up then spit them out with you rejecting them for making a poor first impression on you as a prospective employer... interviews work both ways after all. Exactly what we need to do, teach to the test. That will keep interviews effective. |