Interview at 11 AM today. A bit (unreasonably) nervous about this one as it is cloud/java based and will include a coding exercise. It has been almost five years (longer than I remembered but…) since I wrote any Java code so I don’t expect that part to go all that smoothly. I’ve done a bit of review over the weekend but I’ve also had other things to attend to so there’s only so much a few hours can do.
Realistically if they’re really just looking for someone with smokin’ java skills and aren’t interested in the rest of my background I’m probably not the right candidate for them but I still tend to stress about these sorts of things. I ramp fast (witness my time with Amazon Robotics) but that doesn’t make struggling with the simple stuff in an interview any more pleasant.
The range of potential opportunities makes refreshers much harder. I’ve seen C++. C# and Java based opportunities (and some crossing those lines) along with RTOS, Windows and Linux targets. Add in a bigger mix of places where significant GUI work is involved and I’m dancing all over the place in my reading and bits of sample code.
Over the weekend was doing some OpenCL reading and looking at CUDA a bit. Both interesting technologies but I think I’m going to back-burner then to more OpenGL and C++/C# stuff.
Given the Tuesday java/cloud interview I bought the latest Core Java set. Less has changed in the five or so years since I did serious java coding than I expected. I’m still in need of serious refresher on the java front but since the split is 90% other and 10% java and my broader skills in software architecture and design should be front and center for the sort of positions that would be a good match I’m not overly concerned.
I am thinking about looking at OpenGL from Java a little along the way as I have a copy of ”Pro Java 9 Games Development’ sitting around that uses JavaFX and 3D APIs. Would be good to do a little coding in IntelliJ IDEA again and use some JavaFX code to have another angle on the 3D render stuff…