Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Posted on April 20, 2011 - by Sarath

Zynga India interview experience

Zynga is well known for the social gaming platform which has emerged through Facebook. Zynga has played a great role in bringing about a good number of user base through the gaming platform. Last year, Zynga started their first international office outside US in India. Recently, I appeared for Zynga interview and landed with a job offer.

It happened all of a sudden. My book (Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook) news spread through different mailing lists. One of the XMECian who works as Engineering Manager at Zynga, India refered me hearing this
news. He came online and asked for my Resume. Within a minute after I send my resume, I got a phone call from Zynga HR. He told me that they want to consider me for Studio Engineering team (The team which is responsible for development and maintenance of Zynga games) and asked whether I am available for the following week. We decided to conduct the interview on March 10th. He told that he will book the flight tickets and get back through mail. The call was less than 1 minute. I was stuck. Hooh. I asked the man who referred me what was happening in a minute. He answered simply with a smilie, “Zynga Speed!”.

Two days before the interview date, HR contacted me and confirmed the date again. He sent me round trip flight tickets (Cochin – Bangalore). I had no clue what kind of interview will it be and what kind of role they are looking for. I did not prepare anything since they are conducting me direct interview without conducting the test process.

I was eagerly waiting for February 10th. Finally the day came. The flight was scheduled for 7.45 AM. I was so excited. My first flight journey. I reached the airport in time. Thanks to my friend Harish for dropping me at the airport ruining his sleep. It was Kingfisher red small flight. I got the seat 1F, which was the first row window seat. It was a great experience – flight taking off and landing. The flight reached bangalore on time. There were buses to the city in front of the airport. I took some BIAS – 6 bus and told bus conductor to remind me when reach M.G road. I stepped down near M.G road. When I asked some one standing near the bus stop he directed me to a road. I walked for sometime and I understood that I am not going to reach anywhere. So I hired an autorikshaw reached the Zynga Game Network which is in the 5th floor of Esquire building.

The HR welcomed me and I followed him to a conference cabin. In 10 minutes, an interviewer came. He introduced himself that he is working as Principal Engineer in the studio and has been working in Microsoft-US for many years and after that Google-In for last two years. He asked about myself and scanned through my resume. He asked what I would like to do and what I have been doing. I gave a brief intro about myself and gave an overview of work I have done in the past. He was very curious to know about my projects and asked many interesting questions. I could use the whiteboard to illustrate my explanations. When I told that my interests are with Operating Systems, he asked few questions to check my understanding about Scheduling, Paging, Virtual memory, etc. He asked me three coding questions and 1 puzzle (for designing an approach to solve a game). While going through my projects, he was very much curious about my Pardusman project. We had a very friendly conversation. At the end of my interview, he asked about my interest on which stream I would like to choose. Studio Engineering, Network operations and something else. He explained me about what studio engineering team does. Basically studio team takes
the ownership of games and also develop, release and maintain them. Studio team work on technologies like PHP, Adobe Flash, JS, etc (More specifically Windows platform). I was more specifically interested in a group called Systems Engineering Group (SEG). They write systems tools for servers as well as bugfix, patch, improve already existing opensource systems tools, servers for Zynga’s own purpose of deploying in the servers. But sadly, they don’t recruit freshers to SEG. After the first interview I met one of the XMECian, who works as Senior Software Engineer at Zynga. He gave a good picture of Zynga, how they work, the different teams, etc. I went to the cafeteria for lunch. Zynga offers free food to all employees . I met my Senior at Cafeteria and was having lunch along with him. Suddenly somebody called my name and told that we will have lunck together. He started asking about me and why I am at Zynga today, etc. Asked about my interests, college life and we talked a lot. In the mid, he introduced himself. He was a technical architect at studio team. He told that it is also an interview. We talked lot of technical things. After the food, we moved to a conference cabin. He asked which are the programming languages I am comfortable with. Then he gave me two coding questions. One on Javascript and another on C. He told that he will be back after few minutes. He returned after few minutes and looked at my papers and said few comments and thanks. The interview is over. I got few insights during his interview. The HR came to me and told that I will be next interviewed by Director of Engineering, Studio. In the next interview, he introduced himself and told that he worked in US as Vice president for Myspace. It was great talking to him. We had a very friendly conversation rather than interview question answer sessions. He shared his experience of building great scalable products. I showed him my book. He was really curious to know about me. Very pleasant piece of conversation. By the end of the interview the time was up.

The HR came to me in a hurry and told that Cab is ready and I can move to the airport. He brought me immediately to the Cafeteria and got some cold drinks. HR was really nice, he was taking care of everything. I was accompanied by another person who introduced himself as CEO of some dot com company. I reached airport in time. I came to Cochin on Jetairways Boeing flight. Thanks to my roommate Navin for picking me from airport to hostel. The next day I had a phone HR interview for zynga. It was usual HR questions like expected pay, why zynga, kind of work I look for, etc. I requested her about my interest in Systems Engineering Group. But she told that they don’t recruit freshers in SEG and told they will get back to me in a week.

After a week I got a call from the Zynga HR, whom I had correspondence from the beginning. He told that they need me to be interviewed once more. I agreed and I received the flight tickets again by mail. On Febraury 23rd again I flew to Bangalore. At Zynga, the interviewer came little late due to some meeting. He introduced himself that he is an architect at SEG. I got the clue that they are considering me for SEG. He asked about my interests. Then we had a long interview comprehensively on Operating System internals, application debugging, etc. Finally he asked me about preferred programming language and whether am I comfortable with C. Then we had lunch together at the Cafeteria. After lunch, he wanted me to write a program in python. Once I completed, he told me to write the same in C. Once the interview is over, I had another interview with an engineering manager. He introduced himself by saying that previously he worked as engineering manager at Google and currently work in SEG. Asked about my book and interests. He spoke about the work they do in SRE, etc. Next he wanted me to solve a puzzle on white board. I came up with a correct solution. Then he was open for answering my questions. The HR came and asked to leave as soon as possible not to miss the flight. I returned second time in Jet Airways Boeing. Due to Airshow at Bangalore, the flight was little delayed. It was raining also. I could see the clouds through the windows of flight. Awesome. Thanks to Adarsh for picking me from airport to hostel.

In Zynga, you will find a lot of self driven engineers and is a great place to learn and grow.

On 9th of March, I received a call from HR saying ‘Welcome to the Zynga family’. You are hired as Associate Software Engineer in Systems Engineering Group

Posted on April 1, 2011 - by Sarath

The story of my job interviews with Taggle.com and Yahoo!

It has been a while since I thought of writing my previous job interview experiences with different companies.

Taggle.com came to our campus in month of July 2010. It was CTO, Tej Arora who came to the campus for the recruitment. First of all there was a Presentation about Taggle Internet ventures and how it works.

Taggle.com is a group buying website where you get goods for reduced prices, with greater than 50 % off when there are a group of people to buy it. We had a objective multiple choice test of around 40 questions. It consisted of few aptitude questions, data structure questions, etc. It was a good question paper. By evening 5 pm, the result of the technical test came out. There were around eleven guys shortlisted for the next programming test. The eleven selected candidates were send for the programming round. We were allowed to write code on our own laptop and use any programming language we liked. He gave us two set of questions. Set 1 consisted of 1 difficult question and other set consisted of 2 easy questions. We were able to choose one set for coding. I chose the question to implement text auto completion functionality (set 1) and wrote the code in Python. He verified my program and told me to wait and come back once the programming round is completed by others. My friend Fayaz also had written autocomplete functionality. There were other two girls Nishita Suresh and Legena P.K who had worked on the other set of problems. Four of us had personal interviews. He didn’t ask me any technical interview questions but we had a very friendly conversation about the work and benefits at Taggle Internet ventures.

Once interviews were completed, the results were announced. Fayaz and Me got placed in Taggle.com.

Yahoo! came to our campus on October 30th, 2010. It was a day before seventh semester university exams started. Yahoo was considered as the superstar company that comes to MEC campus with highest pay and perks. The day when placement cell announced ‘Yahoo’ is visiting campus, everyone looked with wow. Placement cell members gave us the info that Yahoo! is going to recruit for Service Engineering team where they look for guys who live and feed in UNIX environment. In the following days placement cell posted specifications and info on what they are looking for and their requirements. There were a lot of XMECians working in Yahoo and they send us some materials they studied during their time. Everyone started seriously preparing for Yahoo with lot of effort. I also wanted to get into Yahoo. It was the time I was working on my book and I had hectic schedules. Some of my seniors who got into Yahoo were famous for Shell Scripting and sed. So I had thought of seriously looking into SED. I spend few days on SED and AWK. It was really nice writing sed scripts, which looks very awkward but performs incredible text processing operations in single line of code. To brush up my shell scripting skills, I went through the first draft of my incomplete book. But, that helped me a lot to fix bugs in my book. I also brushed up few conceptual things like How E-mail works, Networking basics, etc. The day of Yahoo interview came. The cut-off percentage was 70%. There was a presentation on Yahoo! and what they are looking for? Benefits and perks at yahoo. Then we attended the screening test. The test consisted of few aptitude questions, lot of Perl questions, networking questions, questions from OS scheduling, SQL and few other things. But it was not that difficult. After the test, in about an hour the results were out. 15 guys were in. The next was programming round.

They gave two questions, To write an intruder detection system script by parsing the auth.log log file and program for generating random sequence of n numbers from single random seed. I wrote the script for intrusion detection and basic implementation of random sequence generator (I had uncertainty about the question and what I had done was slightly different from what they had meant). After the programming round, they shortlisted four candidates. Joju John Joseph, Subeen N, Neha Mahadevan and me. They announced that there will be three rounds of interviews (two technical and 1 HR round).

My turn for the interview came. They scanned through my Resume and were impressed with my work and Book. Interviewers asked about my interests. I told them that I live in GNU/Linux. One of the interviewer asked me to narrate the story of a computer from the time we press power button until it boots up. I had a long narration of the story of computer boot ups including in-depth explanation of Ramdisk and all (Actually Linux boot was one of my favorite things which I had worked on). Then he asked few questions like What happens when a user browse a Web page, DNS query, DNS records, and few other questions. The interview went through topics like GDB, Core file, Debugging, Killing processes, Init, Signals, Orphaned processes, SSH, SSH Auto-login, and many other questions. I don’t recall most of them. At the end of the interview, they told that they were pretty impressed and satisfied. The next round of interview was HR interview. It was very friendly in nature asking me usual HR questions. He was busy noting down my details on a form during the interview. After the HR interview I went for the second technical interview. They told that there is nothing to ask and we were having friendly conversation about college and environment. The interviewer told me about his college, Yahoo recruitment experience and few things about work environment. When my interviews were over, I had to wait outside with Placement cell volunteers until the three rounds of interview gets finished for other three guys. It took lot of hours. Finally they announced the result. Joju John Joseph and I got the placement offers for Service Engineering team. Neha and Subeen got internship offers.

I will write about my Zynga interview experience soon. Stay tuned!

Posted on February 14, 2011 - by Sarath

Win a Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook from Packt Publishing

Here is an opportunity to win a copy of my book, Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook published by Packt Publishing. Three winners will be selected to win a copy of e-book. Read on for more details on how to receive a copy.

About the Book

I hope you had read about my book from book release post. In case you missed the announcement, Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook is a book consisting a collection of 119 shell scripting recipes along with descriptions organized into nine different chapters according to the usage and subject. If you are a beginner or an intermediate user who wants to master the skill of quickly writing scripts to perform various tasks without reading the entire man pages, this book is for you. You can start writing scripts and one-liners by simply looking at the similar recipe and its descriptions without any working knowledge of shell scripting or Linux. Intermediate/advanced users as well as system adminstrators/ developers and programmers can use this book as a reference when they face problems while coding.

This book is written in cookbook style and it offers learning through recipes with examples and illustrations. Each recipe contains step-by-step instructions about everything necessary to execute a particular task. The book is designed so that you can read it from start to end for beginner?s or just open up any chapter and start following the recipes as a reference for advanced users.

If you would like to learn more about the book check out my book page in this website or check the Packt publishing website.

How to Enter for a Chance to Win ?

All you have to do is comment on why you would like to have a copy of the book in the comments. For a comment in the comment box of this page, you will be given with a single token. You can also tweet about the book by clicking the tweet button in top of this post. If you tweet about the book, you will be given three tokens and you have more chances to win a copy of the book. Once you tweet, leave a comment with URL of your tweet status.

Giveaway Details

The duration of this giveaway is for 7 days. The giveaway ends on February 21, 2011 after which the commenting on this post will be disabled. Three winners will be randomly selected from the ones who have commented by considering the number of tokens for each candidate. Ensure that you use a valid email in the comments form so that Packt publishing can contact you if you win. Winners will be announced on Tuesday, February 22, 2011 and also contacted via email about their prize. Good luck!

Write a comment to win an e-book

Results

Contest is over. Results are out

Congratulations to the winners.
Abhishek Patil, Praveen Kumar and Subeen N will receive e-books

Posted on February 3, 2011 - by Sarath

Yes, I Wrote a Book!

This is the time to unveil the news. Probably, many of my friends know that I was writing the book for last 6 months. Now, it is the proper time to let all of you know that I authored a book on Linux Shell Scripting, The Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook by Packt Publishers, UK.

[ Detailed Information ]

Language : English
Paperback : 360 pages [ 235mm x 191mm ]
Release Date : January 2011
ISBN : 1849513767
ISBN 13 : 978-1-84951-376-0
Author(s) : Sarath Lakshman

The book is written in cookbook style and consists of 118 recipes which showcases many real world scripting problems and solutions. The book is divided into 9 chapters based on subjects Basic commands, File related operation, Text processing, Networking, Backup and Archiving, Internet and web, System administration, etc.

I have been using purely GNU/Linux platform for more than 5 years now. UNIX-like operating systems had always amazed me with the command-line experience. The life would have been much difficult without the terminal and command-line. It takes some patient and experience with different problem environments to master the art of command-line and scripting. In many circumstances, problems such as text processing can be performed in one-liner scripts (Crafted line of command by joining pipes and filters). But the same problem can be solved in a very complex way using large number of lines of code. I have compiled many recipes from my experience to teach how to solve problems in simplest and beautiful manner with minimal lines of code.

It was in last April (2010), I happened to see mail from Packt publishers in search of author for Python Cookbook. That is how I thought of writing a book. I felt that experience I gained from shell scripting contests as well as daily usage experience would be enough for me to write a book. The process of authoring book was a good experience apart from my previous experiences on authoring articles for Linux For You. It takes more effort than an initial version of written material to make it to a productive and useful stuff during the editing process. Also I could learn more. The book is available in paperback as well as PDF e-book format.

Anyway, it is something really glad to have a book in hand that I wrote. I have a dedicated page about my book on this website. Please have a look to Book page. You can also go through publisher website packtpub.com for buying this book. You can download a sample chapter of the book from Book page in this website.

I am currently waiting for the paperback author’s copy to reach me by post.

As book release special, I have moved the website from my previous domain www.sarathlakshman.info to www.sarathlakshman.com. Please update your feed readers and bookmarks to point to this new website.

Happy Hacking!

Posted on October 30, 2010 - by Sarath

I got recruited for Yahoo!

Finally, here is a piece of news.

I got recruited for Yahoo!