A lot of people ask us how to come up with the right idea to solve coding interview questions. The short answer is to keep practicing. However, we believe that there are always smarter ways to that and that’s exactly why we are writing this collection.
Each week, we Gainlo team will carefully pick one or two popular coding interview questions that are asked by top companies recently. What makes the post special is that the “standard answer” is not the focus. Instead, the whole point of the post is to teach you how to analyze the question step by step and how to come up with the right idea from scratch. At the end of each post, we’ll summarize techniques you may use in similar problems.
Believe it or not, solutions don’t come from nowhere. There are definitely patterns that can help you come up with the solution and we are here to tell you about these “secret patterns”. One classic example is the tradeoff between time and space. When you try to make your algorithm faster, you might consider using extra memory to do that and for extra memory, you should consider data structures like hash table. If you become familiar with this type of logic, you are more likely to think in the right direction.
Again, we believe that answers to those coding interview questions are not important at all. You should pay more attention to the analysis process and summarize common patterns/techniques that can be reused in other problems.
In this week’s coding interview question post, I’m going to analyze one of the best questions I’ve seen in recent interviews. As many people ask for the pseudo code in order to help them understand the algorithm, I will also include that in the post as well.
It’s worth to emphasize again that what’s truly important is not the final code/solution, it’s all about the analysis process and I’m going to teach you exactly how to come up with the right idea.
A lot of people are asking whether coding speed matters in coding interviews. The short answer is – yes, it’s extremely important.
Over the past, Gainlo interviewers have seen so many candidates who came up with the right solution quickly but failed to complete the code in the end. This phenomenon has become more and more common and that’s why we decided to talk about it this week.
3Sum is one of the most popular questions in coding interviews. What’s more, it has several variations that seem to be more complicated, but in essence are same as the basic form.
We haven’t covered many topics about numbers in the past. Since 3sum questions have been asked by Google and Facebook recently, it’s a great time for us to analyze this topic in detail now.
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In our previous posts, we’ve covered topics like string, tree, linked list and so forth. In this week’s coding interview question, we’re going to discuss something different.
If you have taken many coding interviews, you will know that a lot of questions are quite close to real life projects and don’t have a focus on specific data structures. Some people find it hard at first glance. However, with some analysis, you’ll realize that there are no different from other questions.
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Tree problems are so popular recently that we’ve seen so many candidates have been asked about it by companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and so on.
On second thought, this makes a lot of sense. Tree is one of the most useful and fundamental data structures in real products. For instance, tree structure is widely used in machine learning like decision trees. What’s more, tree related interview questions can cover a lot of topics like iteration and recursion.
Linked list is one of the most common data structures that are usually covered in coding interviews. Like I mentioned in our previous post, since data structures like binary tree, linked list have limited ways of operation, the problem usually can’t be too hard in an interview. The biggest thing is to really spend your time being familiar with them.
In this post, I would focus on topics including linked list manipulation, queue, BFS and summarize some common techniques as before.
Over the past several weeks, many of our users suggested us cover some questions about BST (Binary search tree) as they’ve been asked about this recently.
BST is a very good data structure to ask in coding interviews. Here are the reasons:
This week, we’re going to talk about a popular question that seems simple at first glance, but can be quite difficult by removing particular restrictions. This type of question is very common in coding interviews as interviewers like to use the easy version as a warm-up question and if there’s still time remained, the follow-up question will be asked.
Also, in our previous posts, we didn’t cover much about array problems. So it’s definitely worth to analyze this problem in depth. In this article, we will talk about topics including array, sliding window, recursion and DP (dynamic programming).
One common misunderstanding is that coding interview is all about solving algorithm questions. In fact, the answer itself is only part of the evaluation and sometimes it is not the most important part at all.
There are many other factors being evaluated during an interview. For instance, your analysis process is at least equally important. More specifically, interviewers care a lot about how you approach a problem step by step, how you optimize your solution, how you compare different approaches and so on so forth.
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This is another post in the coding interview questions collection. In this series, we’ll cover recent hot questions from top companies like Google, Facebook, Uber, Linkedin etc.. More importantly, the goal of these posts is not giving you something like a standard answer.
Instead, we focus on telling you how to analyze each question and how to re-use the same techniques in similar problems. At the end of each post, we’ll summarize some common strategies used in the question.
In this post, we are going to cover topics including hash map, string manipulation and sorting as well.