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

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TRAIN OF THOUGHT

Russian Doll Envelopes: A Dynamic Programming Interview Walkthrough

Russian Doll Envelopes is a dynamic programming problem that interviewers love because it tests whether you can recognize a familiar problem hiding inside an unfamiliar one. The challenge is in realizing that with the right sort, the second dimension collapses into a classic Longest Increasing Subsequence problem. That recognition is the actual signal the interviewer is looking for.

11 hours ago10 min read

Burst Balloons: A Dynamic Programming Interview Walkthrough

Interviewers reach for the Burst Balloons dynamic programming problem because it tests a specific mental move: when forward reasoning fails, can you flip the question and reason backward? Candidates pass when they can make that flip and then define a clean interval state; candidates who can't do that tend to spiral.

4 days ago12 min read

Decode Ways: A Step-by-Step Dynamic Programming Interview Walkthrough

Interviewers reach for the Decode Ways dynamic programming problem when they want to see whether you can reason about validity, not just optimization. The recurrence itself is short, but every transition has a precondition, and a candidate who forgets to check those preconditions will count nonsense and not realize it. That's the actual test: can you define a state cleanly, validate every transition into it, and handle the boundary cases that break naive solutions?

May 29 min read

Edit Distance: A Step-by-Step Dynamic Programming Interview Walkthrough

Edit Distance is one of the cleanest tests an interviewer has for whether you can reason about multi-dimensional state and justify transitions from first principles, rather than pattern-match to a memorized template. The technique you build here - defining state over prefixes and anchoring decisions at a boundary - is the same one that unlocks Longest Common Subsequence, Regular Expression Matching, and most other two-string DP problems you'll encounter.

Apr 2710 min read

Longest Common Subsequence

Learn how to solve the Longest Common Subsequence coding problem to prepare for your next technical interview! Longest Common Subsequence is a classic test of whether you can define a two-dimensional DP state and reason about choices across two inputs simultaneously. Get the state definition right and the solution writes itself. Get it wrong and you'll spin in circles.

Mar 58 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!