> You have three hours. Go!
Cool challenge, but isn't it a bit of a red flag? I don't expect you to ask me to get familiar with a codebase, test, and implement a feature in 3 hours. Ever. It's also oddly specific, if you know what I mean...
Cool challenge, but isn't it a bit of a red flag? I don't expect you to ask me to get familiar with a codebase, test, and implement a feature in 3 hours. Ever. It's also oddly specific, if you know what I mean...
In any given day, I might find an issue or missing feature in one of my dependencies, clone that repository, make a change, submit a pull request, and move on with my day a few minutes later. This is absolutely an important skill.
I don't expect someone to be able to become an expert with a codebase in 3 hours, or even become deeply familiar with it. I do expect someone to be able to get familiar enough to make a simple change, and to feel comfortable working in a codebase that's new to them.
I've done Josh's plan a bunch of times. It's why I prefer my dependencies to be open source. Everything is broken, but if it's open source, it's easy to fix it when it's noticed, push to production to fix it for my users, and send a PR to fix it for the world (eventually, if they take my patch; not everyone does, but I've had many accepted)
Do I have to modify memcached or can I just man-in-the-middle it with a python telnet client à la telnetlib?
I can imagine in the real interview, there'd be more build up to the task, and a description of what the interviewer was actually looking for. That way the interviewee understands what the purpose of the exercise is and doesn't end up lost down rabbit holes.
The more I think about this idea, the more it grows on me though, if you frame it well and find a task that can be explored in the given time frame.
Doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good question of course.
Note, I haven't used C in 15 years, have never looked at memcached code and in fact the last time I used memcached was before redis even existed.
It took me ~26 mins which included reading the article, googling the memcached repo, downloading all dependencies, compiling a first build, grepping for references to incr and adding mult with support for negative arguments, refactoring the guts of incr into two functions to support the changes, compiling, fixing a few compiler bugs then testing, given a few more minutes I'd probably be able to get it PR ready with a full test suite.