Nikolay Kostov's Blog

Identifying the language of a piece of text is a broad topic. Rather than going into the algorithms, this post looks at four methods you can use off the shelf to detect the language of a text from .NET: the Windows Extended Linguistic Services API, AlchemyAPI, the Google Translate API and the open-source NTextCat. Here is what each of them got right, what they got wrong, and which one I ended up choosing.

The biggest obstacle for anyone looking for a job is the job interview itself. Most people manage to find a suitable position and to prepare their documents, CV and cover letter, but when it comes to the interview, few of them do well. In this talk I cover what a job interview is, how to prepare for one, what questions get asked and which mistakes are the most common. Recorded during the "Working in the IT Industry" seminar. The video is in Bulgarian.

On 4 December 2011, from 10:30 to 16:30, the largest online algorithmic programming contest ever held in Bulgaria took place. 216 people took part. The contest was part of the preparation for the first exam at theTelerik Software Academyand for that reason the competitors were mostly students from the Telerik Academy. They had six hours to solve five programming problems from the first six topics of the "Programming Fundamentals with C#" course at the Telerik Academy. The contest was held online onthe new BGCoder.com judge systemand the participants were allowed to use only C#. Anyone can try the problems by registering in the system and practising the contest online. Here you can find the problem statements together with their solutions. The solutions were written by the authors of the problems and use only the topics the students had covered (data types, operators, expressions, working with the console, conditional statements and loops).

The first exam in the Telerik Academy is approaching. The participants will have to tackle, on their own, five problems that are fairly hard for a beginner programmer. Before the exam the students were given a sample paper with five problems similar to the ones they will face in the real exam. The material the exam covers includes the following topics: "Primitive data types and variables", "Operators and expressions", "Console input and output", "Conditional statements" and "Loops". Since the students in the Academy have not studied arrays yet, the authors' solutions do not use arrays either. Published here are the problem statements together with the solutions written by the authors of the sample exam problems.

A while ago I gave an interesting lecture in which I demonstrated live, in the space of two hours, how to write the Snake game in the console using C#. The students told me what they wanted the game to have, I wrote it live in front of them and explained how each part works. Many companies use exactly this game to select their programmers: they say "sit here, you have 30 minutes, write me the Snake game", and then decide which candidate makes the cut based on how fast they are and how good the code is. Here I have uploaded the whole video of the lecture, together with the source code of the game.
Enjoy. ;)