I recently discovered a new approach to database UIs. The technology is called BList. It is marketed as a "Database for the rest of us" and characterized as "The world's easiest to use database." See http://www.blist.com/ There is a video here which does a good job of describing BList. http://www.blist.com/demo.html
BList is venture funded and appears to have plenty of money. They are currently hiring. http://www.blist.com/about_careers.html What caught my eye was the BList approach to hiring. First, they list the typical requirements that one might expect for a software engineer working in this environment. Then though they offer this; <quote> Programming challenge: Without using any built in date or time functions, write a program that accepts two mandatory arguments. The first argument is a string of the format "[H]H:MM {AM|PM}" and the second argument is an integer. Assume the integer is the number of minutes to add to the string. The return value or output of the program should be a string of the same format as the first argument. For example AddMinutes("9:13 AM", 10) would return "9:23 AM". The exercise isn't meant to be too hard. We just want to see how you code. Feel free to do it procedurally or in an object oriented way, whichever you prefer. Use any language you want. While we don't want you to spend an inordinate amount of time on this, make sure you send us commercial quality, production ready code. It's part of the interview process, designed to give you an opportunity to do your best work without time constraint and with all your tools at your disposal. </quote> They are also hiring system admins. Again they have a challenge; <quote> Assume you have a network comprised of 1,000 servers in 10 different data centers - 100 servers in each data center. The data centers are in multiple time zones. Write a centralized script that runs on the Linux PC in your office, which identifies the server in the network which was most recently rebooted. The output should identify the server, the data center it's in, the date & time when it was last rebooted and how long the script ran in order to find the results. Your script must finish in less than 5 minutes (300 seconds). At any time 2% or 3% of the servers will be offline. Your solution should include: * A description of your assumptions about network topology - how your Linux PC connects to each server * Any other base assumptions you make about the servers in the network * A description and, if appropriate, the layout of any configuration file(s) you'll need to solve the problem * Commercial quality perl or python code that solves the problem and prints the results </quote> Comments? BobLQ PS. Apologies for cross posting but this should be of interest to both groups. -- KPLUG-List@kernel-panic.org http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
