http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_sort

I remembered how to « guess » the complexity with intuition, but I was wondering how (I forgot) to effectively calculate complexity of an algorithm. I read the following slides:

http://ace.cs.ohiou.edu/~razvan/courses/cs404/lecture03.pdf

In France – and if I find them – I will take a quick look at my old lessons about complexity and proof. I have to map what I read in English to what I learned in French.

I discussed a few minutes with one of the two Google App Engine engineer. Just great!

But now I finally think it is easy to meet Googlers here. So I am actually not yet on the first step in my Google walk. Maybe will the first step be sending my résumé? The zero-and-a-half step will be being happy of my résumé.

And, well, for me that’s fact now, the Googlers (at least the advocates) are intelligent, smart, know how to present and how to play with the audience to keep it aware.

I met two of them but more heavily discussed with Fred Sauer, GWT developer and advocate. It was a great moment. A little bit stressful of course (thinking « I am talking with a real Googler! ») but simple and social. We even talked about Holland, Holland houses, France, bread and Perpignan!

I have now to raise Dayrama from death (I wanted to move the servlet part to GAE but I did not finish), to update my Olipo blog, and of course to create my current résumé. I have some ideas about that point (to make it more interesting than a piece of paper)…

I rapidly talked to a googler waiting for his (free) bus to home. Maybe it would be a good idea to come back one day and talk again with people around. He was really nice. And, err…, I don’t know if my point of view is distorted, but he looked very intelligent. He works here for one year and has spent three year to get the job. I don’t think I have that time in front of me…

Deeply read:

• Peteris Krumins’s Google Interview
• Corey Trager’s Google Interview
• Rod Hilton’s Google Interview
• Ben Watson’s Google Interview
• Get That Job at Google by Steve Yegge (good reference for Math Books in comments)
• Tales from the Google’s interview room
• Google Interview Questions
• Google Interview Questions — Fun Brain Teasers!
• Ferozeh’s Google interview

This one can be interesting too. I quickly flew over the questions:

• The Best Answers to Tough Interview Questions

And here the real contents of the interviews (the questions), not read yet:

• Google Interview Questions
• Java Interview Questions
• Google Fresher’s latest Interview Questions
• Google Top Interview Puzzles
• Google Puzzles
• Algorithm Tutorials

Oh! and yes, the Visa is a problem. The one I need is an H-1B one.

• H-1B visa

(Joel Spolsky)  »English. Scoring resumes by English skills was a hard decision for us to make, because computer programming is one of those fields where an immigrant who doesn’t speak English can still be a brilliant programmer. That said, years of experience working with programmers have taught me that programmers who can communicate their ideas clearly are going to be far, far more effective than programmers who can only really communicate well with the compiler. It is crucial for documenting code, it is crucial for writing specifications and technical design documents that other people can review, and it’s crucial even for those meetings where you sit around discussing how to do something best: brilliant programmers who have trouble explaining their ideas just can’t make as much of a contribution. » [source]

(Laura, engineer at Google)  »We like to find people who are entreprenurial, and we especially like to find smart, skilled generalists who can pick up new technologies quickly and work on any of the huge number of projects we have going on at any given time. » [source]

Reading blog posts about Google interviews, my mind balances between « Oh my god! I’m so far away from being able to even just *apply* for a Google job » (bad English, disability to understand fast speaking, computer science mathematical skills lost in my old cloudy brain) and « Maybe it’d be a great idea to apply *now*, I’m quite ready, right? »

• Craigslist
• The Google Code Jam I missed this year
• A Google interview experienced user blog

My first thoughts: it looks usual Google contacts you to apply for a job. Err… Google for sure will not contact me, I’m invisible on the net. Is it a first wall to break?

I will go to the Low-Level App Engine conference on Oct., 5th. Rafe Kaplan and Guido van Rossum from Google App Engine team will be there. I’ll see what they look like. Big brains for sure. And I will try to understand what they say. Technical stuff will be OK I hope, but fast English speaking is a problem for me.

• I can abort this blog at any time, simply because I am too bad in English, too disappointed to write anything more, too busy, too far away from an internet connection or too old and rheumatoidish.
• This blog is only a personal story, full of personal thoughts, full of hope and disenchantments. I can do it not interesting at all. Very possible. At least probable. Sorry.

And let me give the purpose now. I am in a very special step in my life. I’ve spent five years of my life trying to build a startup. I was naively hoping this very hard work would get into a success but it failed. Maybe I will give more details about this past story in another later post.

Now my startup is quite dying. I am alone working. I have no clear goal to raise my startup from near death. I have ideas but don’t know if they are good, or even innovative ones. Maybe I will give more details about these ideas in another later post.

A few months ago, I chose to teleport myself to San Francisco to see what’s up here. In San Francisco for two months. To see. I hoped « to connect ». And I weirdly hoped « to answer my questions ». Do I try again a startup adventure? Do I look for a job in a startup here? Do I look for a job at Google? Am I able to get a job at Google?

And then, after three weeks here, visiting like a tourist, or visiting randomly walking, reading, trying to connect to people, testing myself by trying to start another GWT/GAE project, improving my bad English, thinking of my brand new startup ideas, the scales lean towards a quite clear goal: I want to try to get a job at Google. The reasons, the pros and cons, the arguments in another later post.

The adventure looking for a Google job starts now for me. I want to tell you the story.