About - THE MYRMECOLEON CLUB

With that, the evolution of the antlion was complete. After years of existing as ink passing from one page to another, it finally found itself canonized in the grand continuum of life. The integration was so complete as to appear seamless to the empirical eye; its lineage could be traced back to fossilized Neuropterae from a hundred million years prior. The whole axis of time had bent to make room for myth.

Unifying the Technical Interview

Your hair charges with static as Aisha seals the spell. Her nails flare in the light, leaving cyan trails in the air above the keyboard. As she executes the final command, you feel your connection with Andréka severed. You are locked in Aisha’s calculus now.

“I knew exactly where you were going with this, Vidrun. You couldn’t remember how to balance a binary tree, so you thought you’d define the transformational invariants and have Prolog solve them for you.”

“So you’re trapping me in a Lisp instead.”

Rewriting the Technical Interview

Nothing is simple, you think, and smile wistfully. Sprinkle salt in the form of parentheses, and thus enclosed, open your laptop.

Typing the technical interview

“But I’d like to do a little exercise with you nonetheless. Just a simple programming puzzle, so I can understand how you solve problems.”

Once, you solved a problem with a knife of shattered sky-glass. You wonder whether Criss would have the strength to do what you have done.

Hexing the technical interview

“So we should start with a linked list?” You smile reassuringly.

“Yes,” Tim says, “but… um… just a regular linked list, please. I know you’re up on, well, functional programming, but we’re a more pragmatic shop here. Building real software. We want something practical.”

“Yes, of course,” you assent. “Practical. Got it.” One of your spiders–you can’t tell which–is picking its way carefully up Tim’s hoodie, and you scoop it up before typing.

Reversing the technical interview

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.

Invisible Networks

Alternate social networks, covertly advertised as a “writing exercise”, offered up for strangers and seekers.

Infinite Exchange

In a 2011 paper on the medical effects of scurvy, author Jason C. Anthony offers a remarkable detail about human bodies and the long-term presence of wounds. “Without vitamin C,” Anthony writes, “we cannot produce collagen, an essential component of bones, cartilage, tendons and other connective tissues. Collagen binds our wounds, but that binding is replaced continually throughout our lives. Thus in advanced scurvy”—reached when the body has gone too long without vitamin C—“old wounds long thought healed will magically, painfully reappear.”1

Given the right—or, as it were, exactly wrong—nutritional circumstances, even a person’s oldest injuries never really go away. In a sense, there is no such thing as healing. From paper cuts to surgical scars, our bodies are mere catalogs of wounds: imperfectly locked doors quietly waiting, sooner or later, to spring back open.

Gold is less discovered, we might say, than interpreted, with mining thus an oddly literal act of deconstruction.

Reindeers’ Eyes Change Color With Seasons

The arctic reindeer is the only mammal whose eyes shine a different color depending on the season. In summer, when the sun is bright, the eyes are dazzling golden, but as the sun prepares to set for the winter, the eyes become less reflective until it turns dark blue in the dark winter months.