Hey everybody,<p>Long time lurker, first time poster. I am finishing my M.S. degree in CS and looking to head into the workforce before pursuing a PhD doing mostly low-level development. My background in heavy in mathematics and statistics, and one of the positions that interest me is engineering metrics.<p>I would like to get some ideas on what problems to solve for a code sample directed towards this position. I plan on writing in C.<p>Here are some I'm thinking:
1. Implement a service that provides really fast (subsecond query time) regular expression search over the Linux kernel source code (Credit: Stripe).
2. Solution to 1D or 2D Heat Equation problem using message passing.
3. Picking a problem on Google CodeJam and solving it.<p>Any help, suggestions, and comments are really appreciated.
(1) is probably the meatiest<p>(2) sounds intriguing, even though it's "just math." Care to elaborate?<p>(3) it's always better to pick your own problems if at all possible. makes you unique, and besides, given all the attention dolloped on "problem-solving ability", the ability to <i>identify</i> important problems is just as important, if not perhaps more important.