A headhunter contacted me through LinkedIn, asking for my résumé. They introduced me to a job description that pretty much matched my profile.

A week later, I had a one-hour technical interview via Skype. I was asked about HTTP requests, threads, memory management, Java vs. PHP, typed vs. untyped variables, Apache vs. Nginx, and other general web development topics.

Another week later, I was contacted by a JS/PHP dev lead to test me using an online collaborative PHP editor. There were three tests to be completed:

• Identify unique integers in an array (easy).
• Sort an array (easy) without using array_sort().
• Check nested strings, following these examples:
  • '{}' -> is nested
  • '{{}}' -> is nested
  • '{}{}' -> is nested
  • '{}}{' -> not nested
  • '}{{}' -> not nested
  • '{{{}}}' -> is nested

Sorting an array is theoretically easy, but I wasn't sure if I could use PHP's sort() function. I should have asked this question.

So, I tried to create a bubble sort and a selection sort, but I was too nervous to manage doing it.