Coding Interview Prep

Time/space complexity and when to reach for each structure.

Scaling, caching, load balancing, and the CAP theorem.

Structuring stories for behavioral interview questions.

The linear-scan patterns that turn quadratic brute force into a single pass: two pointers, sliding windows, prefix sums, and the array and string costs that decide which one applies.

How hash tables actually behave — collisions, load factor, probing and the worst case behind the average — and the counting patterns that collapse quadratic solutions to linear.

Last-in-first-out and first-in-first-out patterns, and the monotonic variants that turn quadratic scans into linear ones.

Building answers by exploring choices, abandoning dead ends, and splitting problems into independent halves.

Traversals, the BST ordering property, balancing, and the tree structures interviewers actually ask about.

Graph representations, the two traversals, cycle detection, topological ordering and the shortest-path algorithms interviews expect.

Recognising a DP problem, defining state, and the recurring table shapes: knapsack, subsequence and edit-distance patterns.

Binary search variants, non-comparison sorts, the comparison lower bound, and merging or sorting data that will not fit in memory.