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Joseph Friedman
Joseph Friedman

Posted on • Updated on

Technical interviews suck, but Algorithms and Data Structures don't have to.

Like many, I started my journey to a tech career not knowing what technical interviews were all about. What little I knew about them was what I heard from others, namely, that they ask irrelevant questions and ignore job role related skills. Which, I guess, is kind of true.

I decided that I would approach the interview process by preparing for it as if it were a completely separate skill set that I needed to learn, as I would any other skill such as a new language, framework, or API. Truth be told, it was a little more difficult than I expected (more on that later,) but once I got the hang of it I began to appreciate the value of having this knowledge. It has changed the way I approach and solve problems and greatly improved the quality of my code.

YMMV but here is what worked for me:

  1. interviewcake.com

  2. Cracking the coding interview by Gayle Laakmann

  3. leetcode.com

The order mattered a lot. Interviewcake really opened the door for me. I had tried leetcode first but I didn't really get it. Cracking the coding interview helped a bit but I wish it had more in the way of explanations to the coding problems. Interviewcake (paid) taught me the rules of the game. Subsequently I was able to make use of the other two resources.

Thanks for reading my first Blog post. You can find me @decentgradient on the twitters.

Oh, If you have a need for a machine learning engineer / developer relations person, HMU I may have someone for you. (It Me)

Top comments (4)

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Jess Lee

Whoo! Interview Cake is awesome.

cc @gameguy43

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cat profile image
Cat

Thanks for the recommendations! Definitely eyeing Interview Cake and a few Udemy classes.

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Mumbere Arnold

Thanks for the article!

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