I had the interview with IT Innovation at Chilworth Science Park today. It was quite a nice day out; lovely weather and beautiful surroundings. I arrived 45 minutes early (the company I booked the taxi with told me to get a taxi at 2pm if I wanted to guarantee getting there for 3pm). Having loads of time spare, I had a wonder around the site and it really was gorgeous. Plenty of trees and green space. I had a gander in Chilworth Manor where I was welcomed by a chandelier and a rather suave-looking bar. I ordered a coke and started collecting some of my thoughts about how I might respond in the interview to questions when suddenly, a man approached me and said “You look really smart. What are you here for?”. “An interview for a summer placement”, I replied. He wished me the best of luck and then I went on my way.<\/p>\n
I managed to find the IT Innovation reception fine, where I was given a name badge and then told to take a seat. Whilst I was waiting I was watching the television where I saw a slide-show of some on-going projects, such as PrestoPRIME<\/a> and MUPPETS<\/a>, which has actually appeared in the ECS news<\/a> recently. The receptionist then called me up and opened the door to two smartly dressed gentlemen. We all introduced each other and got down to business.<\/p>\n First they told me about the company and what they do. They then asked me what languages I knew and what experience I had, so I told them I know Java, PHP, Javascript (JQuery), CSS, and XHTML. They then asked me which language I would say I was proficient in, so I said Java. Question 1: What is the difference between Question 2: Give an example of where you would use Question 3: Give an example of where you would use Question 4: Have you ever done concurrent programming?<\/strong> Question 5: What is the biggest project you have done?<\/strong> Question 6: How much input did your client(s) have with your project?<\/strong>
\nThey then asked me a few ‘pop-quiz’ questions about the language and my experience. Here are the questions with the answers I gave:<\/p>\nimplements<\/code> and extends<\/code>?<\/strong>
\nAnswer: Implements is where you have an interface and you have your class implement the methods. Extends is where you have a super-class and your class extends it such that it uses its instance variables and methods (which are over-ridden).<\/p>\nimplements<\/code>.<\/strong>
\nAnswer: If I wanted a [set of] objects to be sorted, then I would implement the Comparable interface and implement the compareTo method which would define how you determine if one object is bigger than the other [in value].<\/p>\nextends<\/code>.<\/strong>
\nAnswer: If I had some animals such as Dog and Cat, I would make them extend a super-class called Animal which would have common features of an animal, such as number of legs and colour. Each animal sub-class would then share some common methods and possibly implement some of their own methods slightly differently.<\/p>\n
\nAnswer: Yes, in Java. I used threads for my coursework which was a Mandelbrot Set viewer; rendering was done by pre-made runnable objects which were repeatedly executed by an executor, which used a thread pool. There wasn’t much overhead as the runnable objects weren’t being re-created each time a thread executed.<\/p>\n
\nAnswer: A college project which was a patient booking system based on an existing system in Specsavers. It interfaced with a Microsoft Access database (compulsory) so I had to dig up the OBDC-drivers. You could search for patient records, update them and book appointments.<\/p>\n
\nAnswer: Well my manager only gave an appraisal of the project, but whilst I was developing it, I went around and asked my colleagues what they found frustrating with the current system and what they thought could be done to improve it.<\/p>\n