Sunday, March 30, 2014

How to move to Amsterdam

If you are a Perl developer and want to move to Amsterdam to work for Booking.com, it is a good idea to do these first.

I don't work for Booking.com, and I didn't get through the interview. But if I did these things, I would have had a much better chance.

The interview questions, and the suggestions here are based on what is actually being used by Booking.com in production. They use MySQL, and a lot of their code is old and is written in object oriented Perl. So, understanding them and being able to work with them is important.

Practice writing Perl code:
Write object oriented Perl code (not Moose)
Write code to read from large files
Write code to work with MySQL databases
Write code which uses hashes of hashes and other complicated data structures
Write Perl versions of the examples in Programming Pearls

Read these:
Read the Perl FAQ
Read the MySQL documentation
Read Programming Pearls

Learn about the Booking.com business model
Think about the problems they could possibly have, and how you would solve them.

Learn about database design, normalization, denormalization, sharding and anything else related to MySQL performance.

They are always looking for Perl developers. It would help to prepare well and then apply.

All the best!

4 comments:

Arun Prasaad said...

Why not Moose?

Nitish said...

This post should have been made last year. And they didn't use Moose at that time.

If you work there, or if you interviewed recently, please let me know, and I will be happy to update.

Darren Duncan said...

How about, why not PostgreSQL?

Anonymous said...

Umm, just for the record: We do use Moose. And we already had a bunch of Moose code a year ago. There's also nothing wrong with using Moose OO code in interviews.

Nonetheless, a Perl dev who doesn't understand traditional Perl OO without Moose sugar will have to at least learn it. You can't really write and maintain Moose-using code well without understanding its underpinnings.