Coding Interview Cheatsheet In General

Answering Steps

• 1. Understand the questions (requirement, IO, accepted form)
• 2. Ask the
  • scope
    • scale of data
    • range of number
  • limitation
    • boundary of the questions
    • expected space & time compliexity
• 3. Come up with V1 approaches
  • Algorithm ideas
  • brute force is fine, but explain the ideas
  • come up with V2 solutions, explain the ideas, the Algorithm & data structure
  • Write pseudo code
  • Discuss the edge cases
  • Discuss with interviewer, if OK, start coding
• 4. Write the code
  • clean code, explain, easy-to-understand variable names
  • write test cases
• 5. Run the code
  • solve bugs
  • Explain time & space complexity
  • validate the test cases
• 6. Following up session
  • optimize time & space complexity
  • if input is scalable
  • if input is in stream (rather than batch)
  • if input can not fit the server memory