Lessons learnt - part 1

It was my first day (Monday, May 17th 2010) as an Intern at BBN Technologies. The day I remember for meeting most interesting and brilliant people there. One of the really cool people I met there is my reporting manager, Henry Yeh. I must say he has influenced me in ways that you will see soon in this post. He encouraged me (read as strongly recommended!) to attend early morning 7 A.M. "Core Power Strength" and noon "Yoga" classes offered by BBN at free of cost to all employees. I'm well known for not being able to get up early in the morning. Keeping that in mind, I have not given promise to him but at the same time I couldn't resist his recommendation, So I escaped myself by saying "I'll give it a try!".

You probably would have guessed right. Yes, I didn't make it to the first class. I have to get up by 6 A.M. if I want to be in the class by 7 A.M. It used to be a tough task to me. I tried to compensate missing morning class by attending next day noon Yoga class. He was happy seeing me there. I must admit that people out there in the class are doing very well with yoga postures/stretching whatever you name it. I was a bit disappointed at how rigid I was. I consider myself to be Ave (read as Average!.... can't stop using bitsian slang) Fitness guy. Thats when I realized I overestimated myself. I stand in Ave- (read as below Average) category. Henry gave me a pat at the end of class and said I'll do good after some classes, that gave me some motivation to attend. Well another reason being the class at noon time!

After fighting for several days in the early morning with myself convincing to get up, I managed to attend morning class. Guess what?, I was late by 15 minutes! I felt embarrassed to attend class late. Its better than skipping class! I followed the instructions from Eddie (Instructor) and gathered required equipment for the exercises. I got exhausted so much that I had difficulty going home after the class. Henry is much stronger than I imagined for his age. After I convinced myself that I can attend this class regularly, I stopped attending Yoga classes. If I attend every class they offer who will do my work? It was an easy decision to make, because it doesn't help me achieve my short term goal (overcoming underweight status!).

I continued attending morning classes regularly (late by 5-10min!). I used to feel bad for not making to the class on time. When I mentioned about this to Eddie, he said "You are here, thats all I care!". I felt better but it didn't make me come on time :(. This is the time I learned some valuable lesson. I always used to give up in the 1hr class 5-6 times. I feel like my body is not gonna cooperate and I gave my best. But the truth I realized is thats not the case. Intensity of the exercises and the way they make use of muscles from all angles made me temporarily exhausted. I kept on continue with the class members. What a shame when a old lady continues to do and I stop doing! Thats the reason I like classes. It motivates me to continue in the class. If I were alone doing workout I'm sure I would stop way before I do in the class.

There are 2 takeaway lessons (at least thats what I learnt): 1) We always think we are working hard on something and give an excuse to ourselves by saying we are tired and need to stop working. You never know how hard you can work on something! There is always room to improve. Trust me on this. 2) If I had done my workout with low intensity or skipping classes I wouldn't have seen any improvement in me. It applies in general too. If you are doing some work, concentrate fully on it and be persistent. I didn't overcome underweight just over the night. It took time. You better not work on something if you can't give your best. Because you don't see results and its nothing but waste of your time (I would rather sleep!).

I'm glad that I interned at BBN Technologies (for several reasons.). Being consistent for 3 months doing workout gave me motivation to continue here at Utah. Henry & Eddie, you sure have made it part of my life. Thanks a bunch!

Microsoft Interview

back to blogging after a long pause. I happened to get a chance to interview with Microsoft at my campus. I thought I did really well but surprisingly I got rejected :( waa, :( waa. I'll describe my experiences. As such I have not signed any confidentiality agreements, so I believe its okay to post here.

Interviewer: what is palindrome?

Chiku: any string which is same as when reversed!

Interviewer: what is stack?

Chiku: LIFO (with an example!)

Interviewer: If i give you $1000 and ask you to buy one electronic gadget, what would you buy?

Chiku: Amazon Kindle

Interviewer: Why?

Chiku: I already have a good configuration laptop and high end mobile, So having kindle helps me read papers, books, novels and it keeps me updated with news. Its flexible and easier to carry and read anytime!

Interviewer: What is the most technically challenging problem you have faced and how did you solve it?

Chiku: (said blah blah about last year company work!)

Interviewer: List down the languages you know in the order of how much comfortable you are with.

Chiku: C,Java, C++, Python and Haskell

Interviewer: have you worked on SQL? databases?

Chiku: yes I did! PostgreSQL

Interviewer: Write down a program in C to find out the first non repeating character in a given string.

Chiku: asked several good questions like, what is the domain of characters that make the string?, is small and capital letter should be treated same or not?, etc)

Chiku: described the algorithm, keep track of frequencies of characters and their first indices as I walk down the string. Finally walk over the frequency table and check which has frrequency 1 and least index. wrote c program.

Interviewer: how would you test this code?

Chiku: test cases like, passing null pointer, non-null terminated string, passing strings that have non-letters, empty string etc...

Russ: any questions?

Chiku: what would I be working on If I would be hired?

Interviewer: you could be working in any department. said blah blah about microsoft...d same story!

Chiku: What is the project you are working on?

Interviewer: he said blah blah on virtualization,

Chiku: (since I know about that stuff, I asked some questions and talked about it).

Chiku: I already have an internship offer from XYZ company

Interviewer: We will keep it in mind and will try to process yours quickly.

I wrote c program which is identical to this one but not complete because of lack of time.

Lets try it again, until I succeed. :-)