December 2011
4 posts
Advice on hiring smart college kids
I recently finished interviewing for a full time position at 5 different companies: one tech giant, a mid-sized company, and three startups. Some of the startups are still trying to optimize their process for hiring college kids. To that end, here are some of my thoughts as an applicant in the process.
Most people want to work with the smartest co-workers possible. I have been burned several...
Lessons Learned from Corpionage
This semester, I worked on Corpionage, a Facebook game for people who like to mess with their friends. I thought it turned out pretty well, but there are a few key take-aways.
Our general architecture:
The server is Google App Engine, the UI is GWT, and the Engine is PlayN. (More detail)
Automated testing is non-negotiable. In the last few weeks of the project, a bug fix was just trading...
Weka's API is Cumbersome
I’ve only used Weka a bit, and it appears to be an impressive machine learning toolkit. However, its API is quite a pain to deal with.
Consider the following code that I wrote, which translates from one representation of an example to Instance, used by Weka:
public static Instance getInstance(WeatherLabeledFeatureVector featureVector, Instances instances) {
Instance inst = new...
I Wish Java Had Good Generics
Do you see the problem with this code?
// map from url as a string to content for that url
// apparently URL.equals() is bad:
// http://javaantipatterns.wordpress.com/2007/11/24/comparing-urls-with-urlequals/
private static Map<String, String> urlCache = Maps.newHashMap();
private static String getURLContent(URL url) throws IOException {
if (urlCache.containsKey(url.toString())) {
...