Hi there, I just published a new post, a bit technical this time. Hope you will enjoy it!

The programming puzzle that landed me my job

Back in 2011, as I was getting a bored with my job and I started looking for a new job. During my search, my friend Daniele (with whom I had built Novlet and Bitlet years before) forwarded me a link to the careers page of the company he was working for at the time, ITA Software.

While Google was in the process of acquiring ITA Software, ITA still had a number of open positions they were looking to hire for. Unlike Google, however, they required candidates to solve a programming challenge before applying to engineering roles.

The problems to solve were surprisingly varied, ranging from purely algorithmic challenges to more broadly scoped problems that still required some deep technical insight. As I browsed through the options, I ended up settling on a problem that intrigued me because I thought it resembled a problem I might one day wanted to solve in the real world and seemed to try to test both the breadth of my knowledge (it required good full stack skills) as well as my understanding of deep technical details.

I have good memories of the time I spent investigating this problem and coming up with a solution. When I was done, I had learned about a new class of data structures (suffix trees), gained a deeper understanding of Java's internals. A year later, I got a job offer due in part to this puzzle.

Read more (14 min read)

Let me know what you think!

You can also find an open source version of the Generalized Suffix Tree I wrote to solve this challenge here.