ZenSRC

Occasionally, I’m asked to interview new college graduates for software engineering positions at my company. Over time, I have accumulated what I believe to be a good set of interview questions that check breadth of knowledge more than depth. I do spend time digging into depth for what the interviewee feels they are strongest at just to make sure they do indeed know what they claim to. This question on Stackoverflow caught my eye yesterday, and the top rated answer took me to the the Programmer Competency Matrix. This table is a terrific reference for testing programmer’s ability and I haven’t seen anything else that’s quite so concise yet covers so many of the bases.

As hard as it is, I try to keep my resume, cover letter, and letter of references up to date. It gives me an idea of how my skill set is growing over time and also keeps me relatively in tune with what the job market looks like for Software Engineers.

Several months ago, while going through the motions of updating my resume package, I realized that I didn’t have an up to date coding sample. So began the process of becoming intimately familiar with the Byzantine Generals Problem. For a great analysis of the problem and one potential implementation, check out
Mark Nelson’s post on this very problem.

Although Mark provides his own sample C++ implementation, I went in a slightly different direction and leveraged a few APIs, tools, and technologies that I’ve been meaning to try in a project for some time.

I version controlled my solution to this problem: C++ coding sample on BitBucket and also uploaded the associated Doxygen Generated Documentation.

I’ll likely spend a few posts talking about some of the neat things I ran into along the way, but please take a look and don’t hesitate to leave some feedback!

Update for additional parts:

• Byzantine Generals Coding Sample, Part 2 (Makefiles)

A good friend of mine recently pointed me to an excellent article over at Gamasutra : Book Excerpt: Game Engine Architecture. I liked the excerpt so much that I picked Game Engine Architecture up a few weeks ago. I’m slowly making my way through it, and will have a full review once completed.

Here are some initial thoughts:

• The book is well laid out, with a brief introduction on C++ programming for those that are unfamiliar.
• The book acts as a great jumping off point to further reading. Each topic covered has in-line references to much more in depth coverage of said topic.
• The book is a terrific high level overview of the common problems encountered in Game Engines (Soft real time systems).

One other quick note: even if you work mostly in hard real time systems, as I do, I think you’d be surprised at how useful it is to read about other programming domains. As computer scientists and programmers, we all run into the same sorts of underlying problems. Solutions that work in one domain can often be modified to apply to other domains.