Nikolay Kostov's Blog

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. ;)

While working on software for the automated testing of competitive programming problems in C#, I wanted a module that checks two C# files for identical code, so that I could catch people copying each other's submissions. Comparing every submission with every other one is the easy part; the comparison itself is the hard part. Here I describe the approaches I tried - plain text comparison, the Simian tool, and finally compiling and decompiling to MSIL, which strips away most of the tricks used to disguise copied code.

This year's application campaign for the Telerik Software Academy has finished. More than 430 people applied for free training in one of the most prestigious professions in the world - that of the software engineer. For the third year running, Telerik will offer jobs to the best participants in the Academy. Here is a short summary of the campaign in numbers: who applied, how they scored on the English, IQ and IT entrance tests, and who came out on top.

Free professional training for software engineers at the Telerik Software Academy starts for the third year running. This year more than 300 participants will train free of charge over several months for the most prosperous profession there is - that of the programmer. Those who complete the academy successfully will be able to start work at the number one employer of 2010 - Telerik. The best participants will have the choice of starting work in one of three prestigious roles:

• .NET Software Engineer  (software engineers for the Microsoft .NET platform)
• QA and Test Automation Engineer (software quality engineers)
• Developer Support (engineers for software support and customer communication)

In this blog post I will try to give fairly complete information about the academy. Bear in mind that the information is not final and changes can always occur, both in the deadlines and in the material we teach, because Microsoft technologies change constantly.

Last night was the first day of Microsoft's Build conference, which runs from 13 to 16 September. This is the conference that software engineers and companies working with Microsoft technologies had been waiting for like manna from heaven. The "big picture" of the future of Windows became clear on the very first night: a developer preview of Windows 8 was released, the future of XAML was settled, and interesting things such as native JavaScript, picture passwords and WinRT were announced. Another important point is that the Metro design from Windows Phone will be central to Windows 8.