Level Up Your FAANG Interview: A 3‑Month Training Montage Inspired by Rocky
The Quest Begins (The “Why”) I still remember the first time I opened LeetCode and felt like I’d stepped into the Upside Down from Stranger Things —…
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Thread-Safe Counter in Java: Fix Your First Concurrency Bug in Machine Coding
Thread-Safe Counter in Java: Fix Your First Concurrency Bug in Machine Coding During high-pressure machine coding interviews, seemingly trivial buil…
Decoding recruiter silence
Applying for jobs often means navigating a void of information. The application goes out, and then... silence. This quiet can be frustrating, leadin…
Eight companies, eight different AI coding interviews
If this is new to you: an AI assisted coding round is a coding interview where you get an AI assistant and, usually, an existing codebase instead of…
5 SQL window-function traps that show up in data engineering interviews (with runnable DuckDB examples)
Window functions are the most common SQL topic in data engineering interviews, and most candidates know the syntax. The follow-up questions are wher…
How to explain protecting the AWS root user and everyday admin access in an interview
The interviewer leans back and asks: "You've just created a new AWS account. What's the first thing you do about security?" Many freshers answer "en…
Negotiating Your Salary Like a Jedi: One Technique That Works
The Quest Begins (The "Why") I still remember the first time I got a job offer after months of interviewing. The recruiter threw out a number that f…
Stop scripting interview answers. Build a panel.
Most interview prep fails for the same reason: it happens in your head. You read sample answers, you nod, you feel ready — and then someone asks "te…
REST API Interview Questions (With Model Answers)
These are the REST API questions that actually come up in backend and full-stack interviews — grouped by topic, each with a short model answer and a…
How to Negotiate Your First Salary Offer (Without Blowing It)
Your first real salary offer is the single highest-leverage conversation of your early career. One good negotiation can be worth more than a year of…
Low Level Design Interviews and the Rules Behind a Parking Lot
A parking lot question can tempt candidates to start listing classes immediately: Vehicle, Ticket, Gate, Floor, and Payment. A list of nouns is easy…
Split-Brain Needs a Cluster. Mine Happened on One Server.
Today I want to talk about split-brain. The name sounds dramatic, and the problem is dramatic too. One system splits into two halves, and each half…
The STAR Method: Your Interview Lightsaber
The Quest Begins (The "Why") I still remember my first round of behavioural interviews like it was yesterday. I walked in, polished resume in hand,…
How to Answer 'Tell Me About Yourself' as a Software Engineer (With a Word-for-Word Framework)
"Tell me about yourself" is the first question in almost every interview, and most engineers waste it. The typical answer is a chronological tour of…
A Complete Guide to A/B Testing for Data Analysts
A/B testing sounds simple: show half your users version A, the other half version B, and pick the winner. In practice, it’s one of the easiest place…
2026 - Backend Interview Questions
1. Core Java & OOP Write an immutable class in Java Comparable vs Comparator with examples What is a Functional Interface? Can it have default a…
SQL Interview Question: Find App Store Power Purchasers with Two-Level GROUP BY
Some SQL problems look simple until you read the rules twice. This one is tagged Apple and rated hard, and it teaches a useful pattern: grouping the…
"How Many Servers Do We Need?" — Back-of-the-Envelope Estimation for System Design
"How many servers do we need?" sounds like a question that needs a research project to answer. It doesn't — it needs five minutes of napkin math. Ba…
LeetCode 4000 - 4010 problems: patterns and approaches explained
LeetCode has started publishing problems numbered 4000 and above. At the time of writing this post, there are already 4055 problems. In this post, I…
DSA: Topic 2: Hash Maps & Sets
Why interviewers ask hash map questions They want to see if you can: Trade a little extra memory for much faster runtime. Recognise repeated lookups…
Nobody Warns You the Data Engineering Interview Isn't About Data Engineering
I've sat on both sides of the interview table more times than I can count. Here's the thing nobody tells you going in: the interview almost never te…
Design YouTube — Video Upload, Transcoding & CDN Delivery at Scale (with Production .NET Code)
"Design YouTube" is where two systems live in one product, pulling in opposite directions. The write side is a brutal batch-processing problem: some…
The Hard Truth About Data Engineering Interviews Nobody Tells You
It's 11 PM. You've solved forty LeetCode mediums this month. Your GitHub has a shiny new Airflow project with green checkmarks all the way down. Tom…
JavaScript and TypeScript Interview Questions Explained With Real Production Examples
Most explanations of these concepts stop at the definition. Scope gets a rule about hoisting. Closures get a counter function that increments a numb…
Building My Own Technical Interview Practice Repository
Preparing for technical interviews has made me realize something: solving more exercises doesn't necessarily mean practicing better. I've spent quit…
The Code Review Interview: I Hand Candidates a Broken PR
The candidate had thirty minutes and a 180-line pull request. Sixty seconds in, they said: "Line 43, this variable should be camelCase." I wrote it…
Nine categories: how engineering manager interviews actually get scored
Most EM interview prep fails the same way. You pick three strong stories, polish them until they're tight, run them past a friend, and walk in confi…
A Mind Map for Mobile System Design Preparation
Mobile system design interviews can feel overwhelming. You're asked to design something that sounds simple — a news feed, chat application, ride-sha…
I built a free, interactive SQL practice tool for data engineering interviews
Most data engineering interview prep resources I found online were static — a list of questions with answers underneath. You read the answer, nod, a…
Why Strong Engineers Fail Coding Interviews: A Scorecard Autopsy
The strongest candidate I ever voted no on solved the problem in eleven minutes. Clean. Optimal. Caught the edge case I normally have to hint at twi…