Computer Engineering on maladroit.dev

Chris Hecker Interview Process

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Chris Hecker interview process is an approach to interviewing software engineers that focuses on assessing the candidate based on topics they should already be very familiar with. It is designed to put the candidate into an authoritative position where they have all the answers instead of presenting them a problem they have zero familiarity with.

The interviewer’s role is to ask clarifying questions to test the candidate’s technical knowledge of projects they have worked on. This will often involve asking questions the interviewer may already know the answer to, but framing it as if they don’t. This gives the candidate the opportunity to explain a subject and demonstrate if they have a deeper technical understanding or just surface level details. It also shows off how good a candidate is at communicating ideas to someone who is unfamiliar with them.

Entity component system

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Entity component systems simplify architecture and encourage separation of responsibilities.

Floating points

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The concept of floating point numbers was created to solve the problem that integer values cannot represent fractional numbers. Floating point numbers are an approximation of real numbers due to the fact that their is an infinite number of fractions between two integers.

IEEE-754

The IEEE-754 standard for floats is that some bits represent a mantissa and other bits represent an exponent that is applied as a multiplier to the mantissa.

Interger literals

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Integer literals are numbered values that do not have a fractional component or an exponent.

Representation

Integer literals can be represented in many different forms for convenience. The more common forms are as follows:

// These are different representations of the same literal
binary := 0b1101
decimal := 13
octal := 0o15
hexadecimal := 0x0d

Two’s complement

For signed integer literals, two’s complement is an efficient method for storing positive and negative values.

Left-most bit denotes the sign. (0 is positive, 1 is negative)
Positive values are expressed in typical binary form
Negative values are expressed in binary with the bits inverted + 1

This allows for very easy addition and subtraction operations for the processor. As an added benefit, there is also only one way to represent 0 rather than potentially having a positive and negative 0.