

Metrics engineering position code submission ideas - mydpy

Hey everybody,<p>Long time lurker, first time poster. I am finishing my M.S. degree in CS and looking to head into the workforce before pursuing a PhD doing mostly low-level development. My background in heavy in mathematics and statistics, and one of the positions that interest me is engineering metrics.<p>I would like to get some ideas on what problems to solve for a code sample directed towards this position. I plan on writing in C.<p>Here are some I'm thinking: 
1. Implement a service that provides really fast (subsecond query time) regular expression search over the Linux kernel source code (Credit: Stripe). 
2. Solution to 1D or 2D Heat Equation problem using message passing. 
3. Picking a problem on Google CodeJam and solving it.<p>Any help, suggestions, and comments are really appreciated.
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toomuchcoffee
(1) is probably the meatiest

(2) sounds intriguing, even though it's "just math." Care to elaborate?

(3) it's always better to pick your own problems if at all possible. makes you
unique, and besides, given all the attention dolloped on "problem-solving
ability", the ability to _identify_ important problems is just as important,
if not perhaps more important.

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mydpy
Thanks for the response.

1\. This would be forging new territory for me too, which could be both a good
and a bad thing. 2\. This would require a message passing interface, which is
not trivial to establish (i.e., they may not be able to test). This is where
my skills are most refined and I would be able to defend my answer, plus, it
links back to some of my work as an undergraduate (B.S. applied math, did
research in numerical methods for problems like this) and shows how my
graduate work has matured these core concepts, incorporating more theoretical
and challenging CS. I don't know how much you know about solving partial
differential equations, but a domain is discretized in time and spatial
dimensions and a numerical schema called a stencil is applied as a discrete
analogy to the continuous solution. This is straightforward if you are solving
the problem serially, but is nontrivial in multiprocessing because depending
on the stencil used a communication criterion needs to be established between
the processors so that the information is at hand along the processor-domain
boundaries. 3\. This is probably the most interesting point you've made and I
really appreciate hearing it; you're communicating a perspective that I hadn't
really thought about, and it makes a lot of sense, especially given my
mathematics background.

I think I may be best to tackle 2... Let me know your thoughts.

P.S. Another area that I am trying to sell myself is as an algorithm developer
/ analyst. These skills can be fleshed out in multiple areas, so I don't think
it helps me lean one way or the other, but it is worth noting. Ideally I find
a position where I can be part of a development team with a sizable research
component.

\-- Myles

