Thrillist Web Applications Developer interview questions

1. Write a function that will traverse an unbalanced, unsorted binary tree, looking for a node with a specific value. Your function should return a pointer to that node. 2. Write a small regular expression that will match most valid email addresses. 3. Write a program that, given a filename, returns the number of times the word “Thrillist” appears in the named file. 4. Database design question: An existing e-commerce system sells widgets to registered customers. The company has too much excess inventory. It wants to be able to offer discounts on certain products to certain customers, or certain groups of customers. How would you extend the schema below to support such an enhancement to the system? 5. Develop A Small Ad Server: For our mobile applications (iPad, iPhone and Android) we have to serve up different image advertisements to each different device. Generally our advertisers purchase their space for a month of time, but at times can be for only set periods of times. Sometimes they order for all three devices and other times for only one or two. Finally, each advertisement has a specific URL that the user should go to when they click on the advertisement. We need you to describe how you’d build a small application to serve up these advertisements. You don’t need to write line by line code, but be able to describe the architecture of the system from a high level.

The hardest question was related to manipulating a binary tree and doing some search in it. In fact, it wasn't that hard, but it was the very first question so it's kind of unexpected.