Zhanga: February 24, 2007
The comments are at the bottom of the page. You can view old posts by clicking the months on the left sidebar. RSS feed.
« Feb 21, 2007 | All February 2007 posts | Mar 1, 2007 »Saturday, February 24, 2007 (2 comments)
Google interviewed me for a software engineer in test position. That means I would do testing of code produced by the developers at Google to (for example) determine problems such as cases for which the program will fail. When the interviewer asked me why I want to be a tester, I didn't really have a good answer for her besides the fact that I like coding and software development.
Well, I've figured it out. Why I didn't think of this earlier is beyond me. Why would I like to be a tester? Because I like breaking things! I like feeding input to programs and watching as they explode. Creating things is great and all, but destroying them is so much more fun. It's very rewarding to figure out how to cause things to blow up. (For non-nerds, "explode" is just a generic term for what happens when a program encounters an unexpected situation and doesn't know what to do, but tries to do it anyways. Symptoms include bizarre output, crashing, ...)
Anyways, yesterday I was grading an assignment involving some image manipulations. Part of the assignment requires the student to write code to expand an image by some arbitrary integer (>=1) factor. For example, make it twice as wide and keep it the same height. I was reading some student submissions, and noticed that two of them turned in code that treats black as a special (basically a sentinel) color.
So I figured I'd see what happens if I fed it a pattern of black stripes looking kind of like a UPC code. The program exploded, though rather unspectacularly. It would expand the image by the requested factor but also get rid of all the black. Watching it blow up caused me an odd feeling of immense satisfaction.
I think my Muslim roommate is rubbing off on me.
In other news, apparently Maylene's friends call her a cradle robber because she carries around my baby pictures in her wallet.
Where does the insanity end?!!
11:37PM
Older posts can be viewed through the links to the left, under the main menu.
117 hits since May 5, 2008.
Comments
I like being reminded of the days back when you were cute ok?
Maylene on Sunday, February 25, 2007 at 9:56 PM
where does the insanity begin?
Ronjon on Tuesday, February 27, 2007 at 8:24 PM
Add a Comment