Quick geek question:

[danaeris]

There's a job I want to apply for, but they want the following qualification:
The ability to analyze traffic data and optimize programming accordingly

(this would be traffic data for the website mp3.com)

Is this something easy that I could learn trivially if I don't already know how, or is it something that if I don't know, I probably can't handle the job?

Comments

[zunger.livejournal.com]

That's kinda vague. Do they mean "programming" in the sense of "television programming," in which case this means figuring out what people like to listen to and producing more of that? Or do they mean it in the sense of "code," in which case that means tweaking kernels and so on to maximize throughput according to a particular net.usage?

[danaeris.livejournal.com]

I have no idea. If you want to look at the ad itself to see if you can make more sense of it, it can be found at:
http://www.craigslist.org/wri/20728230.html
Thanks either way.... :)

[zunger.livejournal.com]

Ah. Well, that definitely seems to be the first sense of the word - figuring out what to show when in order to get the most customers.

[danaeris.livejournal.com]

ohhh... now it makes SO much more sense. I thought they were trying to combine a serious web coder with an editor and I was very confused. Thanks for helping me clarify that!

[http://users.livejournal.com/_duncan/]

The term "traffic data" is vague enough to be almost meaningless.

I'd interpret the requirement as the ability to optimize code.

Web logs will tell you the time (start? end?) of each transfer and its size. This lets you know how many connections you're handling simultaneously. Resource-related script problems will be logged there as well.

Something like mrtg will show traffic in bytes/second as a sequence of five-minute (or longer) averages, graphed by hour/day/month/year.

Treat it as one of those posts asking for five years of commercial experience with .NET and ten years of installation experience with 2.4GHz wireless networking gear.