Ok ok.. so when Sprad decides to update my own website, I figure I’m due in for a post or two.
First — Happy Easter! Hope everyone enjoys the weekend, goes to church, hangs out with their family, whatever you do to celebrate – enjoy it! I’m actually staying in lonely Charlottesville this weekend – not the norm – but I’ve been sick recently, have tons of work, and need to have a relaxing, quiet weekend. I hope to get a good bit of work done as well.
I’ve been swamped with work this week, as seems to be the usual with this semester’s classes. Richie and I worked together on building a kernel for my OS class – basically we’re writing code for a skeleton OS named NachOS (it makes us hungry every time we’re working on it..). We spent well over 30+ hours, even used up 6 of our “skip” days, and didn’t even turn it in 100% complete. Talk about frustrating. Not to mention after turning it in, we have to immediately begin on the new assignment dealing with pthreads and semaphores and things of that sort, with a take-home test soon thereafter. I guess it’ll all be worth it when I graduate..
I had a phone interview with Microsoft for a summer internship last Monday. After a series of emails, sending the resume around, and filling out a questionnare, they set me up with the phone interview. It was interesting, to say the least. I was very impressed with the interviewer, he asked really good questions and the interview went very smoothly. He started off with the simple “Why do you want to work at Microsoft?” and “Tell me about your job/class/etc”… he then spent a majority of time on design level questions. Since I was applying for the Program Manager (PM) position, he tested me for potentially what I’d be doing. He started off by telling me Microsoft wanted to develop a cell phone – and that it’s main focus was internet connection/accessibility – and said “What would you do?”. So basically I walked through all the functions it’d have to have, the components, the design, etc. He challenged me and would throw questions back, as well as ideas or constructive criticism. After about 20 minutes of that, he asked me to talk about the program I had in front of me (Microsoft Live Meeting) – and talk about the server/client requirements and details. We went through the same process as before – and then he asked me to write a segment of code in front of him. He basically wanted me to write a function to copy a string into the buffer, but if the string is longer than the buffer, then to concatenate the string so it doesn’t overflow the buffer (hence, buffer overflow, a large flaw in Microsoft programs..). Up until this point, I felt the interview went really well, but I really choked on the program part. I’d never been put on the spot programming like that, with someone watching everything I type as well as what I think, and I only had about 5 minutes to do it. So sad to say, I’m not sure if I’ll get a callback interview, but if anything it was a great experience. I recommend anyone to try to interview with Microsoft just for the experience’s sake..
On the job note, I accepted an internship for the summer at Sperry Marine this week. They are a division of Northrop Grumman, and are located here in Charlottesville. I’m not exactly sure what I’d be doing, but they have tons of work. They do both commercial and government work, and are basically looking to automate and improve ships in lots of ways. I was told I’d be doing all sorts of things, from programming to working on hardware and who knows what! The whole LD house will be living in Charlottesville this summer, it’ll definitley be interesting..