Technical Interview Series

I’ve created nine technical interview questions so far as part of my ongoing series.

Just as a reminder, each question should be solvable in less than 30 minutes time (sometimes less). Some amount of coding is typically necessary to solve the problem (either actual code or pseudo-code), but occasionally, just a plan or discussion-style response is expected (although to date, they’ve all been coding questions).

Hope you’ve enjoyed the series so far. If you have any suggestions, send them my way!

Question #1

Question #2

Question #3

Question #4

Question #5

Question #6

Question #7

Question #8

Question #9

Why Opera 9.5 still isn’t my default browser

Using this page as an example:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa973757(VS.85).aspx

(Powershell)

Internet Explorer 7:

image

Firefox 2:

image 

Opera 9.5:

image

Note how the library tree is not open in Opera — which in the example of MSDN makes browsing the content very difficult. Alas, I don’t know why it’s broken — but it is and I won’t use it. Maybe version 10? :)

Shout out if there are reasons you use Opera…

Technical Interview Question #9

Technical Interview Series

The distance between two points is …

image 
Create a function which does the following…

Record the last 150 points (x, y) provided to the function (bonus points for allowing a configurable number of points).

Determine which of the previous points are less than a configured distance between the new point and the previous points.

There may be hundreds of new points in a second… Consider the impact of time and CPU impact for your solution.

(if your preferred programming language does not have a square root function, assume one exists.)