Last week, I wrote about how to use career values to evaluate a programming job. This week, I’m going to follow up with some characteristics of a programming job you might find using a values-oriented approach.
Finding Your Ideal Job Using Career Values
In a 2005 interview, computer scientist Guy Steele Jr. recounts this story about applying for a programming job at MIT in the early 1970s:
I was naïve enough to go over there on the Fourth of July and put my head in Bill Martin‘s door and said, “I hear you’re looking for LISP programmers.” I wasn’t 18 yet. Bill looked at me seriously and said, “You’ll have to take my LISP quiz.” He reached in a file drawer and pulled out a three- or four-page quiz and sat me down in his office, and I spent an hour or two doing this quiz. He graded it and said, “You’re the first person who has ever gotten it 100 percent right. You’re hired.”
That’s a fun anecdote about a young computer whiz. It’s also an early example of the type of interview now familiar to every software developer. But what I wanted to know after hearing this story was the same thing that piqued the interviewer’s curiosity: “How did you know that much about LISP?”
More Recursive Backtracking (UVa 574)
Last week I wrote about solving UVa 11085 using the recursive backtracking search technique. This week, I’m going to outline a more general approach to recursive backtracking problems. Then I’ll show how it can be adapted to solve UVa 574.
UVa 574 asks us to solve this problem:
Given a multiset $S$ of integers and a target sum $t$, find all subsets of $S$ that sum to $t$.
Solving UVa 11085 with Recursive Backtracking
The uHunt Chapter 1 starred problems contain three examples of chess problems. In Chapter 3, we get back to chess with a variation on the classic eight queens puzzle. UVa 11085 is used to illustrate the algorithmic technique known as recursive backtracking.
When Not to Simulate a Game (UVa 11553)
Some programming puzzles can be solved by simulating a game or process. For example:
- UVa 978 is based on simulating a conflict between warring lemmings.
- For UVa 732, you have to simulate something more abstract: a stack that pushes and pops characters.
UVa 11553 may seem like a classic simulation problem: a board game between two players. But it soon becomes clear that this problem can’t be solved by simulating the players’ moves.
Command-Line Tools for Competitive Programming
When they select their tools, programmers have a choice between command-line and GUI options. Most people use both. For example, I prefer to use GUI tools for diffing a set of files I’m preparing to commit to a source repository. I also like my editor to be graphical, though I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts. But command-line tools are preferable when I’ll be repeating the same action multiple times. It’s a lot more efficient to retrieve a typed command from the shell history than to do the same steps repeatedly using mouse clicks or even keyboard shortcuts. Today I’ll be explaining some commands that are useful for programming puzzles.
Equation Solving is the Key to UVa 11236
UVa 11236: Grocery Store is an unusual problem for UVa Online Judge: it takes no input! There’s just a problem statement explaining the rules for finding the output. The lack of input and the mathematical nature of the problem reminds me of the problems on Project Euler. And as with Project Euler, you could cheat the time limit by calculating the output offline and just having your program print it. But if you would rather write a program to solve this problem quickly, keep reading for ideas.
A Git Workflow for Programming Puzzles
If you practice programming puzzles regularly, you probably keep an archive of your solutions. This can be useful for reference when you encounter similar problems. And even if you never look at some of them again, disk space is cheap and source code is small, so why not?
The simplest way to save your solutions is to put all of the files related to each solution (source code, input text, sample output text, etc.) in a directory on your local disk. I suggest going one step beyond that, and using a source control system to keep track of your solution files. These days, it makes sense to use Git.
Book Review: Deep Work by Cal Newport
For many years, Cal Newport has been writing about ways to get better at doing difficult things. His first three books were manuals for students, advice on learning techniques and where to focus one’s efforts during high school and college. In 2012, he wrote So Good They Can’t Ignore You, about building career capital by mastering valuable skills. While he was writing these four books, he also published the Study Hacks blog, which covers similar topics on a weekly basis.
Cal’s latest book, published last week, is Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. This one offers the following challenge: to improve your ability to do what is difficult, you first have to spend less time doing what is easy.
Combinations and Permutations for UVa 735
Combinations and permutations are worth learning about for programming puzzles, and for programming in general. UVa 735: Dart-a-Mania provides a basic introduction.
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