The Long Road

04/07/2003 Archived Entry: "Vechtomova!!"

So I had an interview with Olga Vechtomova today. [content removed -Rayne]

The job is a pretty interesting one. It involves coding up scripts for complicated search algorithms for a 'smart' search engine that she is working on. The thing is suppose to 'learn' as more people use it, it keeps track of what people will find most relevant about the results received. What is strange though is that the search engine won't really be used publicly. The reason she wants to work on it is to enter it in an Information Retrieval contest. So ya, that would be pretty different, getting paid to work on something only to enter it in a contest. Olga, btw, is a phd engineering graduate specializing in Information Retrieval.

The interview itself was OK. She had me a lot of questions about what my abilities were, what languages I knew, how much experience I had. Though I didn't know much about PHP, Perl, and mySQL I stil convinced her that I could do the job and would only take a week or so to learn all that I needed to know. She brought up some PHP scripts at one point and told me to tell her what they did. Not knowing PHP, I had to mumble through some of what the script did but I think I still did pretty good. Then she asked me to right then and there to write up a perl script to parse text files. I told her that it would probably take me like an hour since I had no idea how to write Perl, so she asked me to describe to her in pseudo code how I'd do it. That was pretty easy. THEN she gave me an assignment to do! HA! I'm to write a Perl script that reads in a text file and prints out the contents of it one sentence per line. So on top of studying for 3 exams this week I had to learn a bit of Perl too. Jeez. She said if I didn't have the time that I could email her some old scripts that I had written and she'd look at those. I emailed someone from the CTC and have the scripts in my mail box ready to go!

When the interview was over, I got out of her office, looked at my watch and it was 10:53!! I was in there for an hour!

Click on the "more" button to see the Perl script that she asked me to write.

#!/usr/bin/perl
open(MYFILE, $ARGV[0])          #filename
        or die "Can't open file";
foreach () {
	$_ =~ s/\n//;
	while(/(.*?)\.(.*)/) {   #regular expression for everything before a period
		print "$1.\n";      #print everything matching the regular expression
		$_= $2;		    #set array element to everything after what was just printed
	}
	print "$_ ";		      #print everything after the last period in the current array element
}
print "\n";			       #new line character