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

Wildcard Matching: A Dynamic Programming Interview Walkthrough

Wildcard Matching is a problem interviewers reach for when they want to see whether you can interpret pattern semantics carefully and resist the urge to write greedy code. The actual skill being tested is the discipline to model the operator's semantics precisely before reaching for a familiar template.

16 minutes ago13 min read

Regular Expression Matching: A Dynamic Programming Walkthrough

Regular Expression Matching is one of the hardest "easy-to-explain" dynamic programming problems in the standard interview rotation. The problem statement fits in three sentences, but the implementation rewards a very specific kind of thinking: can you take a vague, recursive-feeling specification and turn it into a precise DP table with rigorously-defined transitions?

19 hours ago12 min read

Minimum Path Sum: A Dynamic Programming Walkthrough

Minimum Path Sum is a dynamic programming problem interviewers use early in a loop because it's a clean test of fundamentals. Can you define a DP state that's actually self-contained? Can you identify the transitions without overthinking? Candidates who haven't internalized how to walk through a 2D DP table will fumble the indexing, miss the base cases, or jump straight to in-place optimization without justifying it. The interviewer is watching for clean reasoning, not clever

2 days ago10 min read

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.

5 days 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.

May 812 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!