I received a call from a recruiter who informed me that I would have a CodeSignal coding screen. I was told I needed a score of 725 or higher to advance to the next round. I achieved a score of 775.

After emailing the recruiter multiple times and leaving voicemails over the course of two months, I eventually gave up.

1. Given two strings, a and b, merge the strings so that the letters are interleaved in alternating order, starting with string a. If one string is longer than the other, append the remaining letters to the end of the merged string.

ex. "abcd", "efghi" -> "aebfcgdhi" ex. "", "abcd" -> "abcd" ex. "abcdefg", "zxy" -> "azbxycdefg"

This task is quite straightforward; interlace the strings similar to a merge sort.

1. Rotate a matrix around its diagonals.

Given an n x n matrix M, where n is an odd integer greater than 1, and an integer k, rotate M counterclockwise k times. The rotation should exclude elements on the main diagonal and the anti-diagonal (from top-right to bottom-left).

Return the new matrix.

1. Given a list of strings, string_list, and a list of words, words, determine whether each word in words can be formed as a concatenation of consecutive strings in string_list, starting from index 0.

ex. word = "oneTwoThree", string_list = ["one", "Three", "Two"] is False because the words are not consecutive in string_list. ex. word = "one", string_list = ["one", "Three", "Two"] is True because the concatenation stops at the first index in string_list. ex. word = "one", string_list = ["One", "one", "Two"] is False because the concatenation does not start at index 0.

1. Given two arrays, a and b, of equal length, calculate the absolute sum difference, which is the sum of Math.abs(a[i] - b[i]) for all i. Replace one number in array a with any other number present in a to minimize this absolute sum difference.