As promised, we came back with three new problems 🙂 We have three because with the first two problems we gave more advantages to students who applied for the C/C++ Internship.

All results must be uploaded here before May 21, 2011 24:00:00.

Marketing Problem

You don’t like how Facebook works, how it is managing your private information, or you simply don’t like it because everyone is using it 🙂 Therefore, you want to come up with a better alternative. For this purpose, you have to convince some of your colleagues to join the effort to build it.

• How would you convince your friends to join your effort?
• Supposing that you convince your friends to build this application and you succeed doing it, how would you market it?

The solution to this problem must:

• Convince us to build your Facebook alternative
• Convince us to use your Facebook alternative (once completed)
• And most important — convince us to accept you in the Cool Summer Internship!

Web Developer (PHP/JS) Problem

You have a browser interface that contains a lot of rectangular containers (DIVs) on a single layer (they do not overlap). All these windows are located in the page “body” tag.

Your job is to fit in a new rectangular window of given size (width * height, smaller than the browser interface) in the current interface. The list of requirements for the operation:

• If possible, you must not affect the current interface’s layout (so you have to find the best position) to fit it.
• If there is no free space, you must rearrange the containers in the current interface. Try to move the lowest number of containers possible, in order not to visually affect the user that is using these containers.
• If it is still not possible to fit the new window, you must report how large it should be to fit (after all possible window movements to create as much space as possible).

The problem can be implemented in JS and/or PHP. Be aware that a server based ONLY resolution is not possible as far as we know (you still have to use JS, but you can compute the algorithm in PHP and use client-server communication techniques). A pure JS solution is possible.

Software Quality Assurance/Performance & Security Engineer Problem

Twitter will release a new version and you have been assigned to conduct a performance test. Write a plan for this objective that must minimally contain:

• Your strategy in approaching this test
• The test plan, covering Twitter web interface and APIs
• Describe the tools you are going to use to perform the test
• Describe the test infrastructure
• Describe how you are going to gather performance metrics
• Describe how you are going to analyze the records and what metrics you think that are significant.

Thank you for taking the 4PSA Cool Summer Internship challenge! While these are going to be the last three problems on the current edition, this is not our last post about the program. We will come back with more details about our surprise present. 🙂