Last time out, we set you the first question from our recent Speed Coding Challenge, giving you the opportunity to answer it yourselves and compare your efforts to our winning answer. Here’s question 1 again, just to remind you what it was!
Memoization explained part 4: multiple parameters
Last time we saw the implementation of simple memoizers and I promised that this time, we’d take a look into the more advanced overloads – the ones with more than one parameter type.
Softwire Speed Coding Challenge – An Introduction
Softwire recently hosted their second speed coding challenge, after the inaugural competition proved to be a resounding success. The competition was open to current employees (and recently departed interns) and was designed to give everyone a chance to show off their ability to code solutions to a variety of problems in as short a time as they can!
Over the course of the next few months, I’ll be adding some details of the questions that were asked and discussing the winning answers (as well as announcing the eventual winner). In this post, I’ll explain the format of the night and the scoring system used and will give you the first question, so you can give it a shot yourself!
Memoization explained part 3: implementation
Last time we looked at the memoization interface through some unit tests. Today, it’s time to start implementing the basic memoizer.
Photo walk
Shortly before Christmas a number of intrepid Softwire employees braved the cold and went out on the inaugural Softwire Photo Walk. We started at the Tower of London and, over the course of an afternoon, crossed Tower Bridge and walked west along the south bank of the Thames before finishing back in the warm with some beer and food.
There were four categories for inspiration – Water, Urban, People, and Close-up, but everyone was of course free to take whatever photos caught their eye. Here’s a selection of the photos we came back with.
World Water Day Fundraiser
Thursday 22nd March was World Water Day, and since Softwire’s official charity this year is Water Aid, we thought we’d better do something to mark the occasion.
To remind us how lucky we are to have access to safe water, and to raise some money at the same time, we asked colleagues to give optional donations whenever they used water in the office. That included toilet trips, making tea and even washing hands – although we were very careful not to discourage any of these practices!
In total we raised £251.50 for Water Aid, which was great considering all we were selling was water… there was some discussion about whether we should also charge for all the soft drinks in the fridge, given how much water is used in their production, but we decided that it would bankrupt us!
Recovering data from a corrupted Excel spreadsheet using PowerShell
It’s the last thing anyone wants to see at 5pm after spending the day updating an important spreadsheet:
I’ve had this once or twice before and Excel has always managed to recover my data perfectly. But on this occasion, Excel simply crashed half way through the recovery process – and continued to do so on all subsequent attempts.
My first thought was of course to look to my backups, but I had nothing more recent than from the previous night – not much comfort after the best part of a day’s effort. Even a Google for “Excel file recovery” didn’t do much good – I downloaded a couple of free trials, but none gave satisfactory results. One did claim to have successfully recovered my data, but did so suspiciously quickly and was unable to display a preview of what it had done. I didn’t trust it sufficiently to click the “Buy Now” button. Help!
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How we run a software company: Monitoring commercial progress
Some important questions for any business in a service industry are:
- How does each individual know what they spent their time on last week, and how much more time they need to spend?
- How do they communicate this to the people who need to know?
- What should the company do with this information once they’ve collected it?
I’ll give Softwire’s answers to these below.
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Memoization explained part 2: the interface
For those of you who have been on tenterhooks since my last post on memoization, I apologise for the delay. The rest of the posts shall now follow much more quickly!
Last time we explored the potential interface for such a library. But perhaps the best way to demonstrate precisely what my Memoizer will do, is to show you what a unit test would look like. So let’s indulge in a little Test-Driven Development…
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