Previously: Rewriting the Technical Interview.

Aisha’s hands rattle you. They float gently in front of her shoulders, wrists cocked back. One sways cheerfully as she banters with the hiring manager—her lacquered nails a cyan mosaic over ochre palms. They flit, then hover momentarily as the two women arrange lunch. When the door closes, Aisha slaps her fingertips eagerly on the pine-veneer tabletop. Where have you seen them before?

But she is giggling and glad to finally meet you, and her hair bounces in loose ringlets around the shoulders of her yellow sundress, and you like her, this thirty-something engineer who has worked here three years (even if you don’t understand what it is, exactly, that she does for Mineral Analytics, Limited), who heard you were on the market, and just had to interview you personally. She tells you about the yogurt bar, and the yoga studio, and how important work-life balance is to the company. Then she asks you to balance a binary tree.

Previously: Typing the Technical Interview.

Update, November 2023: here are the full term rewrite and language macros which formed the seed of this story. These files include OO notation as well as the basic Algol syntax shown here. There is also a sketch of an object-oriented language with classes and inheritance, implemented as a Clojure macro. I do not remember writing it. It looks terrifying.

Frigitt, vi danser
For et øyeblikk, vi leker
Vi tusen små bladskiper
Gleder oss, på det klare morgenlys

Previously: Hexing the technical interview.

In the formless days, long before the rise of the Church, all spells were woven of pure causality, all actions were permitted, and death was common. Many witches were disfigured by their magicks, found crumpled at the center of a circle of twisted, glass-eaten trees, and stones which burned unceasing in the pooling water; some disappeared entirely, or wandered along the ridgetops: feet never touching earth, breath never warming air.

As a child, you learned the story of Gullveig-then-Heiðr, reborn three times from the fires of her trial, who traveled the world performing seidr: the reading and re-weaving of the future. Her foretellings (and there were many) were famed—spoken of even by the völva-beyond-the-world—but it was her survival that changed history. Through the ecstatic trance of seidr, she foresaw her fate, and conquered death. Her spells would never crash, and she became a friend to outcast women: the predecessors of your kind. It is said that Odin himself learned immortality from her.

Previously: Reversing the technical interview.

Long ago, on Svalbard, when you were a young witch of forty-three, your mother took your unscarred wrists in her hands, and spoke:

Vidrun, born of the sea-wind through the spruce
Vidrun, green-tinged offshoot of my bough, joy and burden of my life
Vidrun, fierce and clever, may our clan’s wisdom be yours:

Never read Hacker News

If you want to get a job as a software witch, you’re going to have to pass a whiteboard interview. We all do them, as engineers–often as a part of our morning ritual, along with arranging a beautiful grid of xterms across the astral plane, and compulsively running ls in every nearby directory–just in case things have shifted during the night–the incorporeal equivalent of rummaging through that drawer in the back of the kitchen where we stash odd flanges, screwdrivers, and the strangely specific plastic bits: the accessories, those long-estranged black sheep of the families of our household appliances, their original purpose now forgotten, perhaps never known, but which we are bound to care for nonetheless. I’d like to walk you through a common interview question: reversing a linked list.

First, we need a linked list. Clear your workspace of unwanted xterms, sprinkle salt into the protective form of two parentheses, and recurse. Summon a list from the void.

(defn cons [h t] #(if % h t))