Goodbye and Goodluck

Two years back I walked into Oracle as a novice fresh out of college. I had big dreams coupled with enthusiasm and a burning desire to learn, to explore and to contribute. Over these two years, I have matured a lot, been exposed to different technolgoies, new concepts, facing and meeting many-a challenges. I may not have delivered 100% output always but I have certainly learned to put in my 100% effort. And for giving me the best and more importantly, getting the best out of me, I give full credit to your constant support, mentoring and encouragement .

As I prepare to say my goodbyes, I take this opportunity to thank you all for each each one of you has in his/her special way contributed to my betterment and growth over these wonderful two years. Also I would like to share some memorable moments and experiences during my stint here at Oracle.

Damon May: Unfortunately there isnt a single English word that can completely describe Damon. Thus, I need to take a couple of lines!:) Damon is a manager who never makes you feel he's your boss. With his clarity and precision in talks, he makes overseas discussions feel like conversations had sitting next to one another . I remember this once when Rutwik and I were beginning to take an issue lightly , Damon's single mail saying that 'this is bad' effectively communciated that he was annoyed with our attitude . Ambiguity and high-handedness has no place in Damon's manner. Till date, I have neither hesitated in seeking clarifications from him nor have I ever been unconvinced with his answer. Thanks for everything Damon!

Cory mclean: 'Committment' is either defined in the dictionary or in Cory's attitude towards work. :) I have never heard the word "NO" from Cory. No matter what the complexity of work or how tight the deadlines maybe, Cory doesnt get worked up instead he simply steps on the gas and charges up his team to work full throttle. However, as it may seem, it is not all work, no play for Cory. He manages to cheek out sufficient time to devote to his extra-curriculars..one must see his rock-climbing pictures to know what I mean.

Jeff Glanville:
If you need a person who can listen in English, think in French and reply in German then Jeff 's your man!:) Jeff can listen to a technical person, think as product manager and can reply in customer tongue . It has been an absolute pleasure working with Jeff. He helped me believe that you dont have to conform to English idioms because one can be jack of all trades and master of all too.

Beth Easterling :

If you don't understand it then you should ask for explanation. The above line might seem very obvious to many but it is really difficult to implement it in life. I learnt that from Beth. I clearly remember this quality of Beth when we were discussing merge project. Everybody was talking about setup/runtime/test/production/pre-production. It might sound easy to many who have lot of experience in product but i bet most of us were getting confused too. But it was Beth who asked this simple question and Thank God she asked. It made talks so simple.

Dave Merill: I still remember the only time I was in touch with Dave during his visit to India. Though he never spoke to me in person, but the manner in which he addressed us all expressed his great ability to peep into future and see how and what in the present can impact the future. He helped me understand the importance of thinking twice before taking each step.

Meg Lloyd: Of all the people discussed here, my least interaction has been with Meg. I still remember this talk Meg gave us . She said: "If we analyze how people check their mails then we will see that they can work more efficiently if they check their mails once in the morning, once in afternoon and once before leaving for home" . Though it seemed a small thing but I practised it and really felt the results. Thanks Meg. And yes, all the very best for your backyard garden. :)

Mehul jain: Very few people, specially with Engineering in Mechanical, can be as talented in Software engineering as Mehul is. Let it be writing scripts, writing documents, executing plans or even helping customers with certificates and SSL issues; Mehul has done all jobs with aplomb. All the very best for the future Mehul! You are an out-n-out achiever.. there's nothing stopping you! Keep the spirits high ! :)

Prakash pulla : Prakash, to me, is synonymous for ' systematic ' . There is a proper , systematic fashion in which he does every task. It really helped to learn how one can get-things-right-at-the-first-go by removing all ambiguities before one starts working on something.

Raja Ram Bhakta: The ability of a person to be a manager and a peer at the same time can be best learned from Raj. He makes you understand a problem in a way a peer would explain it to you and simultaneously conveys what a manager needs to. I shared an amazing comfort level with him and never hesitated in seeking clarifications/help. Thanks Raj!



Anurag khanna: I admit that I am awful at planning. And I never realized this until I worked under Anurag. He is such a meticulous 'planner' that it makes me realise that I have miles to go to learn the ABC of planning!:) Let it be managing resources or setting deadlines, Anurag manages it all in a realistic and efficient manner. Managers generally either push their team for project deadlines to look good in the eyes of superiors or set very relaxed dates to gain brownie points with their team. Anurag has always managed to strike a perfect balance between the two mentalities.

Rutwik chandorkar: Rutwik is undoubtedly the best mentor I have had. He has not only guided and encouraged me during my early days at Oracle but has also been my idol as far as technical skills are concerned. He has always been the perfect blend of a friend and manager. It was great working with you Rutwik and I am very glad that we are still in touch and hope that we continue to be!

I Thanks for your time and patience for going through this long post.:) I would love to (and sure hope the feeling is mutual ;) )to keep in touch with each one of you, so I part not with a goodbye..but with a 'hope-to-meet-again-soon' .........:)

With best wishes,

Shalinder Mahindru
Shalinder18@gmail.com
Shalinder18@yahoo.com

A picture is worth a thousand words

I don't say that i have everything under the sun nor do i say that i have all my dreams fulfilled. But i know i am very lucky. I know i am blessed. I know god has been kind to me.There are an estimated 100million children living in the streets in the world today(info from google). But i think i am blessed enough to be not amongst those. I think i have received a great education, a nice childhood and a unending protection of my parents whenever i wanted one. But not every one is as blessed as i am. I think of all words that i have written the below picture speaks them in one go :-




Lets unite together and make it happen for those millions of children too.

Procurement's Dress Day

Recently we celebrated Blue/white dress day in procurement and after a long long time one could see such involvement, apart from santa/banta games which we play during X'MAS time (thanks to Raj to initiate that event). This event was really special for me. For the first time in history of my life :) i won some lucky draw.People say it was because i was wearing lucky white shirt (mind you i borrowed that, and if that predicton is true i won't return the shirt) , others say it was pawan (one who picked out my name, if that is true then he will have to pick up all lucky draws i will participate in). But what ever it was i got the lucky gift and it was no less than WORLD CUP for me :)

It was nothing less than what cafu would have felt .

C(Sharp) or C (flat)

Don't you for a moment think that in a blog where you can find a lot of interview questions related to software field this is yet another post on the same lines.

This is my new passion, hobby or interest ...whatever you wanna name it. let there be MUSIC !!!!

Yahama PSR-295 is certainly is apple of my eye these days. Though i have not procured one but soon i will have one.
So these days this geek is into C#, c(flat) , C7 and Majors in (c)

And there are miles to before i can play :)

Top 100 Eng colleges accroding to Outlook

Recently Outlook came up with 100 Engg colleges. Here it goes http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20060717&fname=Cover+Story&sid=5
Every Magazine has their own criteria of judging the colleges. Recently India Today place my alma mater NIT Surathkal at 8th position and Outlook has placed at 18 position. Maybe there will be a day when we will be able to see a true and single picture. Or maybe as someone has said there is never a single solution to a problem and we will have to live with such a variety of Rankings. Whatever it is this will surely hike sale of magazines :). So happy reading and keep blogging !!!

I wanna be slim (part -1)

I have not met a person in my whole life who is either not cranky about getting slim or pissed about him/her being too thin. I feel this might be because people I meet keep this topic as a hot topic around them. wait wait ... i don't wanna get into philosophical side of this story. The bottom line is that people are worried about their health. And why not I have seen people who are healthy and I bet they are more active too. And there are scores of problems that a connected to being obese or being emacipated.

This post is a true endeavor to enlighten people what i felt some months back regarding my health, what do i feel now and what i foresee in future.

It's not been the easiest days of my life as far as having great food is being concerned. It was not that i couldn't get spicy or sweat or mouth licking food. But it was my strong will that stop me from having it. Though i have been bit lazy in following the same schedule lately but the most of things that i have left eating though unwillingly have really really helped me.

How?

Wait till i post my next post!!

Happy reading.

Golmaal !!!!

If you are gonna compare this golmal with Amol Palekar's one then STOP........
It is nowhere near that, i think we can't compare it either. It's is different. It's not that this movie is boring but doesn't have a very nice flow. Though i bet it won't allow you to leave the talkies. On a whole a nice entertaining movie . Bole to paisa vasool !!!

Chat Windows in blog

I have recently added chat windows in my blog "Just Write". Earlier i thought it will be really a pain to add this. But it is fairly simple. There are a loads of free services which provide chat window software. Though they have premium version too but i think for a novice a simpler free version is more than enough. Just check out the one i have added in my blog . It is from cbox . There are few others as well such as tagboard, flooble. So make your choice and make your blog better.

Happy blogging!!

Interview at Techspan noida

I recently gave interview at Techspan. Here are the details of the interview.

Round 1: Written test

The test was of 1.5 hour duration. It was more of generic test. General domains were:

• Logical questions
• puzzles
• Visual questions
• Rotation and revolution of figures and finding out what final figure will be.
• Flow chat problems.
• Mathematical Questions: probability, Time and distance, relative speed etc.

There we in all 40+ questions; time was 1 hr though the HR told me that i can take approx 1.5 hrs.

Round 2: Personal Interview (Technical)

The second round was by some technical expert and he went through my resume and kept on asking all the technical languages i had specified. He didn't miss a single language mentioned there. Though he asked some related questions i.e. if there was jsp specified then he asked if I knew structs. Just be normal and say I don't know. And write only those things in the resume which you know of. The fields I was tested on were:

• Java
• Core java concepts
• Servlet
• SQL
• PL/SQL
• JSP

Round 3: Personal Interview (techno/HR)

The third round was by manager. Things which I were interviewed were very general ranging from my interests, my ethics, why I want to shift...so on.

Interview at Progress Software

I think this was the most technical interview i had. But no doubt in technical terms fundu.

Q1: Implement “toString” in Collection framework
Q2: Thread pooling program :- checked on Design patterns, Threads fundamentals, Resource sharing and synchronization
Q3: Post Order traversal
Q4: Why is hash code there is JAVA object class
Q5: How is hash tables implemented in Java.
Q6 : Two puzzles
a) There is one machine which gives Pepsi, another coke and third which gives both.
These machines are wrongly marked in such a way that none of them have correct
label (viz coke,pepsi,code/pepsi). Now how will you re-label them properly if you
are allowed to switch on just single machine. By switching on the machine you can
come to know what that machine provides.
b) You are given a rectangular piece of paper. Now you cut one rectangular piece of any
size and orientation in this paper. How will you cut a single line on resultant paper so
that each of the cut pieces have same area and are congruent.

Round 2:

I was given a computer and was allowed to use any IDE ( is used Ecllipse) to code . The question was to convert any number into word :
1,013 : One thousand one hundred Thirteen
100 : Hundred

I coded almost full in about 1/2 hour and then there were more generic questions like namespace (I was because asked about namespace because i had worked in XML. Then was asked about DOMParser and SAXParser. More generic java/j2ee questions.

Amazon Interview Round 4

Round 4:

It was again telephonic with one of the top shots. Also the last of the marathon.

Q 1: There are two linked lists. You need to find if there is a intersection in these lists. By intersection what he meant was that if two link lists merged at some point.

Q2: After solving the above he asked me the node at which they will merge.

Q3: Given a graph , you are given a particular node and asked all the node which can be accessed from this node and all node which can access this node. (Directed graph)

Q4 : If 2nd October 2001 was a palindrome : 10022001 which date before this was palindrome?


Mail me if you find some problem solving the above.

Amazon Interview Round 3

For third round they flew me down to Chennai and there I had four rounds:

Round 1 : This round went for approx 1 hr.

Q1: They asked me about the product i was working on. They asked me if i would have the creator of the product what design patterns i would have used? What are the loop holes in this design? blah blah blah. I think these questions were more on the specific project than on generic interview as such. but this was the only interview where i was asked about Synchronization, threads and other java/j2ee stuff.

Q2: If you have been given a currency format which is of the American standard then how will you write a regular expression for the same. the format examples $110,000,000 or $1,000,000.
Solution: Though I didn’t know much of regular expressions and to start with i wrote more of finite automata machine than regular expression, but in the end I was able to produce the desired result.

Q3: Pre-order of a binary tree without recursion?
Solution: Easy solution by using stacks.


Round 2 : This round went for approx 1.5 hrs. This was one of the most amazing rounds. It started with all amazing stuff on what I do , I read, my hobbies , if i am self motivated on reading about new technologies if yes then what and so on so forth. I think I solved just one question. And total duration was 1.5hrs!!!

Q1: You are given a tree and a pointer to one of its node.
One can call lock or unlock functionality on this node.

LOCK : There can be two outputs to this method "lock" i.e. true when we were able to lock this node and false when we were not able to lock this node. The condition is that if the node which needs to be locked has a parent which is already locked then one can’t lock that node. Also if any of its successors are locked then also one can't lock that node.

UNLOCK: If that node is locked then unlock it.

Now we need to store some information in the nodes. So I was asked to design the data structures of the nodes which will be helpful to me to store information.

Then this question went on from binary tree to n-ary tree.

Solution: Will be posting soon.

Round 3 : This was the great round. Loads of questions. Lot of brain-storming and i think it was a mix bag in end. But I think i gave each and every question a nice shot and that might have effected my results.

Q1:

Q2:

Q3:

Round 4:

Q 1: Difference between inner and outer join.

Q 2: One puzzle. Your are participating in a game show. It has three doors, which have a goat, a dog and a merc behind them. Now you have select one door. It is kept closed. Now the anchor selects one door. He makes sure that it is not the one which has merc behind it. Now you are given an option to go with the your first selection or select a new door. What will you do?
Solution: I will select a new door. He asked why? I explained using probability.

Q 3: To calculate number of petrol pumps in Chennai.

Amazon Interview Round 2

The second round was also telephonic. It went for almost 1.5 hours though scheduled for one hour. The main reason for that i think is that i was solving questions and each time i was asked to re-look at the solution I used to improve it further.

Question 1: Shuffle pack of cards
Solution 1: It is one of the most common questions that are being asked in Amazon (Though I came to know this only after the interview:-D). I started with using Sets again but the complexity turned out to be very bad. I assumed that there is a random function with time complexity O(1) and I call this random function to get values from 1...52. Once i get that random function i will add that value in a SET. So in end I will have all the numbers from 1...52 in a random fashion. The catch in my solution was that if the random function returns number x, m times than for each number we will call this function m times and for 52 numbers it will be (m power 52). This is huge. I tried giving another solution but was no better. In the end he moved to next question. Check out here for solution.

Question 2: Count number of lines, characters and words in a file (Given that we don’t have much access to flashy java methods like readline, String methods like indexOf etc.)
Solution 2: The constraint given above simply means that one has to read character by character. I started with a basic program of reading character by character and passing that character to switch statement and doing some logic when ever i got ' ' , '\t', '\n','\r' . But the problem with this solution was that whenever i used to get some odd input like empty file, a file with just '\n' or a file with just a space then i used to patch my earlier solution. Then as i was giving solutions to problems i was asked if I could store some "state". I tokk that lead and provided another solution: -

Store a "state" variable. i.e. when ever a NON- special character (i.e. character apart from ‘ ‘ , ‘\n’ , ‘\r’, ‘\t’ , EOF comes then make the state 0. Whenever a special character comes make state 1. So whenever we go from state 0 to 1. Increase word count. Whenever we get \n or EOF we increase line count. And each time we increase character count.
After this solution no clarification was asked for.

Question 3: Write USE case for Auction model where you have a seller, an item and a buyer.
Solution: This was more generic design question and was just asked to write use-case. Not seq diagram etc.

Learning points 1: Have a nice grip on time complexity. They will make you calculate for each of the solutions you give.
Learning points 2: Concentrate real hard for that 1.5 hours and if you are not clear of the problem then don't hesitate in asking it again.
Learning points 3: You will be asked to write proper code.(even you will be asked to communicate the same through phone)
Learning points 4: The questions will be very generic and never specific to some language.
Learning point 5: Used a variety of test cases to check one's solution before presenting the same to interviewer.

Black and White

I dont think this post needs any description. Just follow the below link.

http://picasaweb.google.com/saurangshu/LifeInBlackAndGray

Too good. Cameraman : Saurangshu Pandey , Manager Oracle IDC

Amazon Interview(Round 1)

Recently I under went Amazon interview and have received the offer letter.
Following are the details of interviews.

Round 1: Telephonic

I think my first round was more of patience than of intellect. Interview was fixed three times. I was made to wait for 1.5 hours each on first 2 instances and finally was interviewed on the third time. Round1 went for 45 minutes.

Question 1: Resume walk through, mainly concentrated on my latest project. Asked me my best and most challenging project and the questions revolved around those.

Question 2: Intersection of two arrays. Though he reframed the question but the basic point was that I was given two arrays and I have to find singe array which is intersection of the 2 input arrays.
Solution: I used Java set collection and gave a decent explanation then i was asked to write code for that.

So the above 2 questions took full time. The basic points of the first round were to be very much clear about what one has written in resume. Also be ready to write some proper code (in whatever language you prefer)