A Step-by-Step Guide to Solving Technical Interview Questions

Technical interviews really suck, don't they? They can feel like you're trying to solve a Rubik's Cube blindfolded while riding a roller coaster. But fear not - armed with a solid and structured game plan, you can navigate that wild jungle with some style and swagger. That's the goal with this post - to give you a problem solving framework that can be applied to a broad set of technical interview questions so you can show off your knowledge and skills even when you get stuck.

Mar 6, 20255 min read

FEATURED POST

Never Miss a New Post.

TRAIN OF THOUGHT

Binary Tree Maximum Path Sum: A Step-by-Step Interview Walkthrough

Binary Tree Maximum Path Sum is one of the genuinely hard tree problems in the standard interview rotation. Most tree problems are about traversing a structure or computing a single value per node. This one asks something more subtle: find the best path anywhere in the tree, where "anywhere" includes paths that don't start at the root, don't end at a leaf, and bend through any node.

10 hours ago12 min read

Serialize and Deserialize Binary Tree: A Step-by-Step Interview Walkthrough

Serialize and Deserialize Binary Tree is one of the rare interview problems that's actually a design problem. There's no fixed answer — you get to choose your own encoding, and the interviewer is watching to see whether your choice is principled or arbitrary. The signal here is whether you can think about data as having structure that needs explicit encoding, not just values that get written down.

1 day ago11 min read

Lowest Common Ancestor of a BST: A Step-by-Step Interview Walkthrough

Lowest Common Ancestor of a BST is a problem that interviewers use to test a specific kind of reading comprehension: did the candidate notice they were handed a BST, or did they treat it as a generic binary tree? The signal is whether you treat the data structure's invariants as algorithmic information rather than incidental detail.

2 days ago9 min read

Kth Smallest Element in a BST: A Step-by-Step Interview Walkthrough

Kth Smallest Element in a BST is a problem interviewers reach for when they want to see whether you actually understand what a BST gives you, or whether you treat it as "just a tree." The interviewer is watching for whether you exploit that ordering or wastefully recompute it. The signal here is whether you treat a data structure's invariants as algorithmic information.

3 days ago11 min read

Validate Binary Search Tree: A Step-by-Step Interview Walkthrough

Validate Binary Search Tree is one of the great traps in the interview rotation. The problem looks like a five-line traversal, and most candidates write a five-line traversal that's almost right — passing every easy test case and failing one subtle one. The reason interviewers love it is that the wrong solution is genuinely tempting: "check that the left child is smaller and the right child is bigger" sounds like the definition of a BST, but it isn't.

4 days ago9 min read

I hate interviewing. Technical interviews are especially annoying. So I created this blog to practice for technical interviews. Hopefully it's helpful to you, too!