HackerX Sydney, 2nd March 2017.

If you haven't heard about it before, HackerX is an invite only networking event for software developers and companies seeking to hire.This event was held at Fishburners in Ultimo, which is a shared workspace/incubator for tech startups. It is structured like a speed dating event where each candidate gets 5 mins in front of a prospective employer.

Anyway, since my contract with my current employer is up in a few weeks, I thought I would head along and check it out, more out of curiosity than anything else.

They put on free beer, soft drinks and pizza so at the very least you get a free feed and a few drinks if not a new job. And it what other situation would it be acceptable to interview with a few beers under your belt?

After about 1/2 an hour, the event kicked off, with the company reps lined up in in two rows of tables, while the candidates queued up for their 5 minutes to shine in front of a prospective employer.

Now, 5 minutes isn't very long, so if you are serious you better have your pitch down pat and some copies of your resume to hand over. I happened to run into a friend and was having a chat and ended up on the end of the queue. I highly recommend you get yourself on the front of the queue.Why?

Well, it turns out that there wasn't enough time for every candidate who rsvped to get some face time with every company. As it turned out, the speed dating ended before about 10 of us got a chance to speak to any of the companies on the second row of tables.

 However, in spite of this I think it is quite a worthwhile event, in terms of being a really efficient way to get your resume into the hands of companies that are definitely hiring... much better than the broken method of using recruitment companies as intermediaries.

So check it out if you get the chance.

Update:

I actually got a callback from one of the hiring companies who invited me to their own group recruiting event for further interviews, unfortunately I was on holiday in  Fiji and could not attend.

The Knights Travail

Recently I was challenged to solve the Knights Travail in C++ - its a fairly simple problem in finding the shortest path between two squares on a chess board that would be legal moves for a knight piece.

The knight can move 2 squares across and 1 square up or down and vice versa. The positions on the chess board are represented using algebraic notation. There are a number of ways to solve this problem, but I chose a simple uniform cost search - which is like a bredth first search with each move on the chess board being having an equal cost, so the shortest path will always have the least number of moves. 

Because this challenge was to demonstrate my knowledge of C++, of course my solution is object oriented and completely over engineered. Anyway, you can find my solution here: The Knights Travail.

It's hosted on ideone.com so you can even execute it and put your own travails in. Just type them in to the input box down the bottom, eg: A1 B2

Happy Travailing!