Coding challenge followed by a telephone interview.

The interview process was satisfactory. The coding question was ambiguous, especially given it was an OA using a Codility-like interface.

Suggestion: Jump on the simpler questions and try to finish them as soon as possible. There was one question that was quite difficult.

1. Given a string of 'a's and 'b's, return true if all 'a's occur before all 'b's.

Example: --> aabb returns true --> a returns true --> b returns true --> aaba returns false --> abab returns false

1. We are given a list of alphanumeric events and need to check if it is sorted. An event can contain a letter (alpha), a hyphen '-', or a number.

• All alphas (including '-') should be sorted before numbers.
• Two alphas should be sorted in natural order.
• Series of numbers should be collected and compared; for example, "abc123" and "abc456" are in sorted order because 123 < 456.
• If two numbers have the same value, the one with the smaller length should be sorted first.
• Ensure numbers are handled correctly. For instance, "abc122axy99z" has two numbers: 122 and 99. Numbers can also be padded with zeros.

Example sorting order:

abc is sorted before 123 123 is sorted before 456 954 is sorted before 01234 abz is sorted before axy

Test Input: ["abc123hij-k", "abc123hij-k", "abc456hij-k", "abc954hij-k", "abc01234hij-k", "xyz123hij-k", "x123hij-k", "21030003020"]

Test Output: true