Leo's story

Interviewing at BBC

I moved to the UK to study Sound Engineering at University of Surrey, which was a lot of fun. During my time at University I realised I did not want to work as a sound engineer full time and also wrote my first line of code and fell in love with it. Coding became my main passion, but remained a hobby as I already had a job to go to once I graduated. I have worked in the Residential Home Technology industry as a Design Manager, then Design & Project manager, but eventually realised writing code is what I really wanted to do. I resigned and joined Makers, which has been an amazing learning experience. I am now looking forward to joining a company where I can make a difference as a junior developer, contributing with my skills and positivity. I subscribe to Agile/XP values, and would like to carry on pairing and test-driving development in my work as a software engineer.

Code sample

            # Understands how to render a query's answer as a string
            
            class AnswerPresenter
            
              def self.stringify_answer(query)
                new.stringify_answer(query)
              end
            
              def stringify_answer(query)
                query[:valid] ? assemble_answer(query) : INVALID_QUERY_MESSAGE
              end
            
              INVALID_QUERY_MESSAGE = 'I have no idea what you are talking about'
            
              private
            
              def assemble_answer(query)
                stringify_operands(query[:operands]) + ' is ' + query[:answer_value].to_s +
                  (query[:credits]  ? ' Credits' : '')
              end
            
              def stringify_operands(operands)
                operands.join(' ')
              end
            
            end
            

In this code, I like how the methods are very simple and the abstraction level is consistent, with most abstract at the top moving to most concrete at the bottom.

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