I adore it..It’s cute!!

I joined Welham in class 6, a time when I could hardly talk in English. Forget about reading a novel, I hadnt even heard of Enid Blytons that all my peers had read. Hadnt heard of Agatha Christie or Nancy Drew or Roald Dahl! English was so elusive to me, be it pronunciation,talking fluently or writing essays. All girls there could talk very well, write amazingly and I used to envy them. I used to love reading though, but only Nandans and Champaks! I just could never pen down my imagination on paper, it just would not happen however hard I tried. My mind would create such adventurous, silly, stupid,funny images and events, but I just could not express my feelings in English! And on the same side, I would win essay writing competitions in Hindi. It troubled me a lot cuz I missed getting a Rank 1 only cuz of this ‘silly’ English twice in a row!  I always scored lowest in English, would just get a 4 on 10 in essays. Grammar though I could study, so there I would cover up! Thankfully, in class 8, I got amazing English teachers, Mrs. Devgan and Mrs. Khambatta and Mrs. Chhabi Hari. Somehow, they all really inspired me to do well. Once, I landed up getting the highest in article writing, a 7.5. I remember exactly what I wrote even till date. That was it! I decided then that no more would English make me miss my Rank 1. I had missed getting MTSE scholarship twice, I just had to get it now! And then, I got it continously for 3 years! Swati daftuar, a voracious reader and my bed neighbour would guide me and we would read under our quilts with torch light.  I soon forgot that I was doing it to improve my English or rather learn it. She used to read weird novels and somehow somewhere I fell in love with her collection of books. Her dad is a writer, writes in Bengali. With every letter her dad sent her, there would be a carton full of novels, and all of us would enjoy the books!!

As a part of our curriculum of class 6, I came across this poem below. I could connect with it really well! Now, I  find it very cute. Please, when u reading this poem, read it in a singsong way as a kid would!

The English Language

Some words have different meanings,and yet they’re spelt the same,

A cricket is an insect, to play it is a game.

On every hand, in every land, its thoroughly agreed,

The English language to explain, is very hard indeed.

Some people say that you’re a dear, yet a dear is far from cheap,

A jumper is a thing you wear, yet a jumper has to leap.

It’s very dear, it’s very queer, and pray who is to blame,

for different meanings to some words pronounced and spelt the same?

A little journey is a trip, a trip is when you fall;

doesn’t mean you have to dance, whenever you hold a ball,

Now, here’s a thing that puzzles me: musicians of good taste,

will very often form a band – I’ve one round my waist.

A door may often be ajar, but give the door a slam,

then your nerves receive a jar – and then there’re jars of jam.

You’ve heard, of course of traffic jams, and jams you give your thumbs,

and adders, too, one is a snake and others add up sums.

You spin a top, go for a spin, or spin a yarn maybe –

Yet every spin’s a different spin as you can plainly see.

On every hand, in every land, it’s thoroughly agreed,

The English language to explain, is very hard indeed

Harry Hamsley

Bored..

Hieeeeeeeee….

I am getting so bored. I’hv been behaving very lazily the entire day! Attended just one lecture,it was a PPT given by one of my profs. The PPT was very redundant, she went on elaborating the same point again and again. I managed to read 3 Ed articles during her jabbering without missing her jabber either! Why can’t PPTs be a lil more interesting and funny??? She tried to make it interesting, but guess how? Asusual geeky methodology…comparing nature with the various embedded platforms available in the market. Yikes! And on top of that, the “students” of my class were making notes and also writing down her stupid nature-platform jokes!! Do u then think I would have the capacity to handle more lectures….??? It must b crazy of u expect so much from me…LOLzz

Since then, the day has been beautiful in a very special way. I have just been reading, sleeping, listening to awesome music, writing down a lil, remembering childhood days,dreaming, making  a card, sketching…just loved the day!! Noone disturbed me, no phone calls to attend for a change.. it was lovely!! Oh wow! bhai calling…This day seems to be getting better! Finally, bhai ko meri yaad aayi.. Its time to hear class 9 school gossip, his Pjs which somehow Akshit finds very funny! Oh I remember now, its Teacher’s Day tomorro. He’d want to tell me which of his silly and dumb classmates (girls) are dancing and on which silly songs! Heeh!!

Gotta go,

Cheers,

Shruti.

Adobe campus recruitment..

Hi,

Many people have been asking me the questions that I was asked during the entire recruitment procedure, so finally I stepped out of my laziness cocoon and here it comes!!

ADOBE campus recruitment

We had a written exam first, which had 3 sections as usual.

WRITTEN:
Section1: Quant + Simple reasoning 45 questions in 45 minutes
Extremely easy, no preparation needed! Only rocket speed.
Section 2: Engineering test 10 questions in 45 minutes
Section 3: C test 10 questions in 45 minutes
A very typical “adobe” written paper covering questions from C, DS (algos),  Finite Automata, Microp.
Only C and DS need to be done properly for this. The questions from rest of the topics are simple to crack!
Out of 200 people, 16 were shortlisted.

IINTERVIEWS:

Round 1:
•    Memmove function
I used the same concept given in crack the interview, but he seemed unsatisfied. He asked me to optimize it further. On being able to do it, he asked me to generalize it for void*. Did that too!
•    Read last 10 lines of a file
Since I dint know the length of the line, I told him the linked list funda about reading the last n lines. He refused to take that for a soln on the grounds that my soln was order N. He was looking for something entirely different which I dint know.
•    Delete the given node of a linked list and then write an algo to insert a new node in a linked list, which is being operated upon by multiple threads, most efficiently using multithreaded programming, synchronization tools.
•    Implement realloc, generalize for void *, include all possible test cases
•    Draw a line between 2 given points using putpixel function

Round 2:
•    Store each word of a given sentence in a retrievable data structure. (pseudocode wudn’t do)
•    Generalize the method of dynamically allocating 2D array i.e. implement a function called 2Dmalloc(should work for all data types..Playing with void** becomes messy)
•    Write a function to print Fibonacci numbers till n recursively (try coding this!)

Round 3:
•    Delete the complete Binary tree. (kept asking for optimizations)
•    2n+1 elements, 1 number unique, find it. (Told the interviewer that I already knew it, he confirmed the soln n moved on)
•    How will u figure out whether 2 2D rectangles overlap. (Gave him 3 different soln only to receive his unsatisfaction! )
•    Some question on DS.. I forgot. Must hv been solvable that’s why I can’t recall it!
•    Discussion of error handling, OS, memory stuff…blah blah

Round 4:
•    Solve Sudoku in 10 minutes, the Director checked your approach in detail.
•    A variation of rat and maze problem: Starting and ending points could be given anywhere. You had to find the shortest path from the Starting point till the ending point.
•    HR stuff.. Hobbies/dislikes/philosophy/Success/Failure/college/school..blah blah

Many of the above questions were accompanied with other basic questions related to that Data structure/question. And be it any question, the interviewer loved to go in depths of each and every line I wrote, almost always seemed unsatisfied with the optimizations I did, and kept asking further and further details of the concept till I would say ‘I don’t know this, Sir. ‘ !! Basically, they loved troubling u! But all the interviews were very interesting and the trouble indeed was lots of fun!

Round 5:
This was an HR round, more of a formality! It went like any other HR round would go except the interviewer kept noting down all the details on a piece of paper!! I think we were already selected by this point of time. The questions typically included:
1.    Why adobe?
2.    Where do u see urself 5 yrs down the line?
3.    Weakness/strength
4.    Leadership quality
5.    College life
6.    Cultural activities/Sports
7.    Any plans to do further studies?
8.    Hobby
9.    Resume centric questions
10.  Family background
Basically, it was simply jabber n jabber. You can’t prepare for this one, I was blatantly honest n did lots of talking !!

Hope this helps all those who’l sit for S/W Tech companies !

Cheers,

Shruti.