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I knew that when I started the job search, I would ultimately end up doing a lot of algorithm development in my interviews, so I made an investment in a good dry-erase whiteboard to practice on. I explained to Susanna that, as a programmer, a whiteboard is just as important as the computer or code itself, as a consequence of Miller’s thoughts on human memory channel capacity. We as programmers simply can’t juggle all the necessary things that we need to know in active memory – we need to write it down, plan it out. If you are a programmer, you need a whiteboard.

So for my interviews, I’ve been studying data structures, time complexity, design patterns, etc.. I spent some time writing a list of things I ought to study up on. Here’s my list, and my progress for studying.

• Algorithm to reverse a string
• Linked List from scratch
• Quick Sort from scratch
• Insertion Sort from scratch
• Selection Sort from scratch
• Bubble Sort from scratch
• Singleton pattern
• Factory pattern
• Composite pattern
• Greedy algorithm
• Backtracking algorithm
• Memoization
• Hash table from scratch
• Binary tree class + search from scratch
• Heap from scratch
• Preventing integer overflow
• Web services in: Java, C#
• Java command line compilation + flags
• GCC command line flags
• Ant, Make
• Eclipse project/build configurations

The ones I haven’t studied up on I still feel confident that I could write if asked in an interview, but I’d still like to study up on them ahead of time. I also took the time to take all of my study/learning java code and organize it into a package hierarchy for easy access, and discovered a pretty easy way in java to pull resources in.