Welcome!
If you choose to accept the task before you Congratulations!This exercise is fairly simple, but will allow you to showcase your programming, research and algorithm skills. You will need to write two methods loadData() and find() for a program that finds zip codes of people by searching on the first N letters of their last names.
For instance, let's say you wanted all the zip codes for all the people who's last name starts with 'J', or "Jo" or 'Sm', as in "Smith", "Smarts" or "Smalls".
In this zip you will find three classes:
- Main.java
- AbstractUserZipCodeFinder.java
- UserZipCodeFinder.java
- and a datafile dataFile.csv
IMPORTANT: The dataFile.csv does contain duplicate last names and zip code pairs! (After all, there are many people in the same zip code with the same last name) You should be prepared to account for this.
The only class you need to worry about is UserZipCodeFinder.java, in which you will find two unimplemented methods loadData() and find(). The goal of this exercise is to optimize how long it takes to run the find() method for various inputs. There is no need to worry about how much time your loadData() method takes to prepare and load the data into whatever datastructure you want to use in the find() method.
Both loadData() and find() are automatically called as part of a test program when you run Main, and results will be printed for you.
For instance, I wrote an implementation of loadData() and find() and here are my results from running Main on my 2015 MacBook Pro running in debug mode through Intellij IDEA:
Searching for names that start with '' returned 600001 results and took 42115 micro-seconds Searching for names that start with 'A' returned 19728 results and took 1661 micro-seconds Searching for names that start with 'B' returned 55608 results and took 3947 micro-seconds Searching for names that start with 'Ba' returned 12348 results and took 756 micro-seconds Searching for names that start with 'Jo' returned 12864 results and took 828 micro-seconds Searching for names that start with 'Smi' returned 7788 results and took 500 micro-seconds Searching for names that start with 'Bra' returned 2844 results and took 168 micro-seconds Searching for names that start with 'P' returned 29388 results and took 2010 micro-seconds Searching for names that start with 'Perkins' returned 528 results and took 46 micro-seconds
If you have any issues getting started or questions please don't hesistate to reach out to me. I am happy to also help you setup this project in Intellij and walk you through how to run it.