Technical Interview Prep

Start with arrays, strings and hashmaps — they appear in 60%+ of coding rounds.

Learn binary search, two pointers and sliding window before dynamic programming.

Practice 'blind 75' questions on LeetCode to cover the most common patterns.

Time yourself: most rounds give 20–30 mins per problem. Solve under pressure.

If stuck, verbalize your thought process — partial credit often comes from showing your thinking.

Start every system design question by clarifying requirements (functional + non-functional).

Estimate scale first: 'This handles 1M DAU, so 100 req/sec at peak' before designing anything.

Know these building blocks cold: Load Balancer, CDN, Database (SQL vs NoSQL), Cache (Redis), Message Queue (Kafka), Object Storage (S3).

Practice designing URL Shortener, Twitter Feed, WhatsApp, Netflix, Uber, and Google Drive.

For senior roles: know CAP theorem, consistency models, eventual consistency, and sharding strategies.

Think out loud — interviewers want to see your process, not just the final answer.

State your approach before coding: 'I'm going to use a hashmap to get O(1) lookup...'

After writing code, walk through it with a test case to show it works.

When you don't know something, say 'I'd research X, but here's my best understanding...' — don't bluff.

Practice explaining technical concepts to non-technical interviewers for leadership/architect rounds.