Interview Feedback

     This semester I have been trying to figure out what I will do during the summer. Unfortunately the course offerings for the summer are very sparse and I have already taken most that are offered. Since I would rather wait till the fall to take more courses I have been trying to find alternatives such as another co-op job.

     Two weeks ago I had an interview downtown at a video company. I have not had an interview in a while and I ended up doing rather poorly. A couple days later I received an email from the co-op coordinator saying the company decided not to hire me. Along with the email they had sent some feedback about what I could do to improve. I spent some time reflecting on this feedback last week, since my midterms were finished and I had a bit of free time.

     The things they told me were not overly surprising since I had already identified them as things I had struggled with during the interview. The first was that I needed to improve my C++ programming knowledge. During the interview they asked me to write a simple C++ program on a white board but I had trouble coming up with an answer.

     I have become very proficient in languages like Java and C# by using them for my hobby programming projects. I have only used C++ for smaller school projects and a couple times during co-op. Since I do not practice C++ very often I often struggle with it.

     For practice I decided to try writing a game in C++. I have never written a game in C++ before and wanted to find out what libraries are available for making games. I though there must be some popular libraries since game development companies use C++ almost exclusively. C++ is the language of choice since modern games are always trying to push the limits of the current hardware's performance.

     One popular graphics library I have heard about is called Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL). SDL is one of the most fundamental graphics libraries and many higher level libraries, for example a python library called pygame, are written as extensions or wrappers of SDL.

     Another library that I have been interested in trying, not related to games, is QT. It is a user interface library that people have been talking about recently and which is used by applications like Google Earth and Autodesk Maya.

     In my next blog entries I will talk about the game that I made in SDL and a bit more about the interview feedback.