Posts Tagged ‘linux’

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 March 28, 2011 - by Sarath

How to apply for Google Summer of Code – A byte of note

Google Summer of Code organizations list has been published. Soon, within april 8th you will be able to submit your applications. Google summer of code is a premier Open Source programs managed by Google. The certificate of Google Summer of code adds higher market value to your resume. You will be receiving certificate stating 3 months Student Developer for Google and also you will be receiving a good paycheck of $5000.

I participated thrice (2008,2009,2010) with different organizations. I would like to give you few advices regarding how to apply and participate.

There are 171 open source organizations got accepted by Google for GSOC 2011. You can see the list from:
http://socghop.appspot.com/program/accepted_orgs/google/gsoc2011

Each of the organizations will accept few projects (No of projects as per decided by google). No of projects for each organization varies according to the market value of organizations. You can submit one or more (I prefer 3 applications) to same or different organizations.

Each of the organizations will have there project ideas page. You can select an idea that interests you or propose a new idea to them. (But already listed idea has more changes to get accepted – I feel so).

Each student who get accepted will be assigned with a mentor from the corresponding organization. Mentor will be a very experienced guy who is already contributing to the projects. In my case during my first summer of code, surprisingly my mentor John Palmeri is the author DBus-IPC, Gnome Executive and Author of GNOME network manager. You can get such kind of exposure during the project.

How to apply for a project ?

Go through the accepted organization list, Click on the organization, Go to the ideas page. You can find many ideas listed with details (Prerequisite, Difficulty level, Expected mentor, Contact person, Related information URL, URL of mailing list, etc). If you find some idea interesting, invest some time researching about the background, and related technologies related to the idea. Once you gain basic information about what you exactly need to do with project and what technologies you should use, contact the mentor or person listed.

To collect necessary details about the project and get the background of technology, look into mailing list associated with the project/organization. You can also subscribe to the mailing list.

Contacting organization or associated person:

e-mail :
Write properly what idea you want to work on, your background and how you wanted to work on the project. Include as much as details on how you will implement the project and ask necessary questions.
IRC Chat:
If you are not familiar with IRC, IRC is a type of group chat system widely used in Open Source development environment. Each organization will have a channel (Eg. #pardus-devel – pardus linux developers channel), where you can login and chat with a registered nickname. For open source project, the chat server will be irc.freenode.net.
To use IRC, you can install XChat client using: sudo apt-get install xchat
or use the webchat interface http://webchat.freenode.net/
For basics of IRC chat, read http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/irctutorial.html
You can use the assigned contact person’s nickname to contact him over IRC.
IRC is a public chat where many are interacting each other. Please do not spam or ask stupid questions like (I am newbie. I want to participate in GSOC. Plzzz help.)
Write proper words rather than using chat language like ( u thr. plz. i gt ths idea frm). Do not flood the channel. Be very decent and formal over the chat channel.
Before you ask questions, I strictly recommend read this article to following the hacking culture:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

How do each organization select Project proposals ?

From my experience, there will be a group of people from the GSOC organization who review the project proposals. They will have an internal voting system. They vote induvidually and rank the list of proposals. According to the number of project slots assigned for the organization, they select the higher ranked proposals. The most higher preference is always to get successful completion of projects. So they look heavily at the strength of your project proposal. The project proposals that consist of as much strong details to support the fact that you are going to complete the project get accepted.

How to write a project proposal ?

Usually you will find a specified format for the project proposal for each of the organization. Once the application period opens, you will come to know about the format.
To have strong proposal I recommend to include the following things:

1. Your background. Showcase your abilities (Even if you haven’t done much. Market what you have)
2. Do enough research on project ideas and arrive at list of technologies you want to use (Include libraries required, dependencies, challenges, diificulties). This should show much of research and effort you have invested in the project.
3. List out the features of the idea you are going to implement and how it benefits. (You can discuss with the mentor and arrive with features and benefits)
4. If you had contacted the mentor before and had positive conversations about the project and discussions. He might also talk about you to other individuals in the organization. You can talk the public organization IRC channel, it gives lot of attention to you from the members who are going to vote for your proposal. If you have discussed technical details and give confidence in your ability, that will be positive to you while they vote.
5. Prototype (Optional)
   Prototypes are bonus points for a proposal. You can create GUI prototype designs, code prototype designs, etc if necessary. (Last time, I coded a command Pardus Linux Live installer in 500 LOC, served as prototype)
6. Timeline
   Timeline is a must for a project proposal. You should indicate how you are going to spend three months time to completion and development of project.
   A good format will be :
   Week 1 (May X – May Y) – Development of M module. Customization of C using T tool and commit changes…etc
7. Version control
   You should be familiar with some version control systems like SVN, GIT, BAAZAR, etc
   Here is a basic How to on SVN:?http://betterexplained.com/articles/a-visual-guide-to-version-control/
   You should let then know that you are comfortable with the organization specific version control.
   Before writing the proposal you should check out code from the corresponding branches related to your project idea.

For example, if you are contributing to Webcam app – Cheese, you should check out code of cheese using Git version control and build the application from source code and try out things.

All the best with your project proposals.

Posted on February 11, 2011 - by Sarath

KDE conference in India – confKDEIn

If you are a FOSS enthusiast or an avid GNU/Linux user, there is no need for an introduction to the KDE deskop environment. KDE one of the big and nice FOSS projects in the world. KDE is built up on the top of Qt toolkit.

KDE-India is organising conf.kde.in, an event for Qt and KDE contributors and enthusiasts to meet up, share their knowledge, contribute, learn, play, have fun and create limitless possibilities using Qt and KDE technologies.

KDE-India is a group of volunteers who are a part of the worldwide KDE community, and have been meeting up at various FOSS events in India. We have given Qt and KDE talks at various colleges and universities in India.
The main objective is to organize an all-inclusive conference on Qt and KDE in India that would cater to beginners as well as experienced folks.

This is not a high end geek conference but a beginner level conference where you can attend and learn a lot.

One of the primary goals of this conference is to make students aware of latest Qt and KDE technologies and trends. They will get a chance to listen and interact with Indian and international KDE contributors, industry professionals and Qt/KDE experts. We highly recommend students to take part in the event and learn how to create amazing Qt and KDE applications for desktop and mobile platforms and be part of the community. To find out more, do read our selection of talks and workshops on the conference website.

Block the dates 9 – 11 of March 2011 on your calendar to attend confKDEIn.

See you at confKDEIn.

To read more or register for the event, please check out http://conf.kde.in

Posted on June 18, 2010 - by Sarath

Youtube video downloader shell script

Recently I were looking for youtube downloaders over the web. I found many websites filled with lot of ads. Few websites where there which gave some neat interface to download videos. I got interested and decided to write my own shell script to parse and download videos. By looking into HTTP requests, I came through how downloaders work.

The logic is pretty simple. By passing the video_id which is received as v=videoid from youtube video URLs, to? http://www.youtube.com/get_video_info?video_id=videoid, we obtain a metadata file which contain metadata about the video we need to download. We extract a parameter called tokenid. Again pass the video_id and token to the same URL to obtain the video. We can also specify formats in which it is to be downloaded such as mp4,flv or 3gp in different video qualities. fmt=id parameter is passed to specify file format. By carefully watching the HTTP requests from youtube page, I collected variety of fmt arguments for different formats and quality. I have compiled all these info to write a youtube video downloader shell script. Download it and have fun.

Download the scrpt from here : youtube_dl.sh