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A Cover Letter in Brainfuck

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Re: A Cover Letter in Brainfuck

#21

Post by joeframbach »

SonOfLilit wrote: post #19
acomjean wrote: post #9

I have questions: Did the letter work? Program and interpreter and letter, but why not let us with X86 machines cut and paste. What did the program do?

Of course the letter worked in the technical sense. In the business sense - The letter was sent as a PDF to a contact I had, who promised to print it and hand it to the relevant recruiter. I never heard back from them, but I did get accepted somewhere much better, and I have good reasons to suspect there was a man-in-the-middle involved. I'll try and extract the text from this PDF. Of course I lost the source years a…

I tried to OCR the letter.

The hex, I couldn't get.

http://hastebin.com/raw/ogehefofez

Re: A Cover Letter in Brainfuck

#24

Post by acomjean »

joeframbach wrote: post #21
SonOfLilit wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course the letter worked in the technical sense. In the business sense - The letter was sent as a PDF to a contact I had, who promised to print it and hand it to the relevant recruiter. I never heard back from them, but I did get accepted somewhere much better, and I have good reasons to suspect there was a man-in-the-middle involved. I'll try and extract the text from this PDF. Of course I lost the source years a…

I tried to OCR the letter. The hex, I couldn't get. http://hastebin.com/raw/ogehefofez

Thanks! Thats the source, so that will do nicely.

Re: A Cover Letter in Brainfuck

#25

Post by SonOfLilit »

Author here.

Due to popular request, I extracted the text from the PDF, it's in a gist at the bottom.

A funny (on my account) story:

After three days with little sleep, the last half-day spent finding just one more byte to remove so it fits in a nice rectangle[1], I was finally done. I sent the complete .asm to Oded Margalit, an IBM researcher who organizes the CodeGuru programming competitions in Israel, and he immediately responded "I can shave 5 bytes off".

It turns out instead of the "quit" system call all the books tell you to write:

    ;;; the program has finished
    quit:   
        mov     ah, 04ch        ; quit with return code
        mov     al, 0
        int     021h
You can just put a "ret", and DOS loads an address containing these commands to the bottom of your stack so it works.

You had to see my reaction.

[1] it was supposed to be 32x13 characters at the bottom, after it was done I decided to make it 8x52 characters on the right because it looked better. Had I known I would do it, I could've gone to sleep much earlier...

Re: A Cover Letter in Brainfuck

#26

Post by SonOfLilit »

danparsonson wrote: post #4

That's great :-) For other teeny DOS BF interpreters, see http://www.hugi.scene.org/compo/compoold.htm#compo6 (1999) - smallest was 98 bytes!

At 19 my raw assembly optimization skills weren't even at national level, and we live in a _tiny_ nation. Some people do amazing things with x86 ASM.

Re: A Cover Letter in Brainfuck

#30

Post by SonOfLilit »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #27

My guess is that most HR people would see that and think "Troublemaker", Next.. But, then again, maybe you dont want to work for them anyways.

I was so much of a special case at the time that they would do that anyway. I needed to take a gambit that would have some probability of failing at the gatekeeper, but would yield rewards proportional to risk.

And of course _I didn't send it to an HR person_. I don't understand why would a programmer ever send his CV to an HR person. My CV always gets passed to a programmer who can read it and see my value, he passes it on to his team lead, who knows he wants _me_ and lobbies HR on my behalf. Works way better.

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