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Interview Preparation
What to study and when — a focused plan for software and AI interviews.
Featured guide
Interview field guide
System Design Interview: A Beginner's Playbook
A five-step framework for the design round, a worked URL-shortener example, and the mistakes that cost candidates offers.
8 min readData structures & algorithms
- • Arrays, strings, hashing
- • Two pointers & sliding window
- • Trees, graphs, BFS/DFS
- • Dynamic programming
- • Heaps & intervals
System design
- • Requirements & estimates
- • Load balancing & caching
- • Databases, sharding, replication
- • Queues & event streams
- • Design a URL shortener, feed, chat
AI / ML interviews
- • Bias-variance, regularisation
- • Transformers & attention
- • RAG and vector search
- • Evaluation metrics
- • ML system design
Behavioral
- • STAR format answers
- • Conflict & failure stories
- • Leadership & ownership
- • Why this company?
- • Questions to ask them
8-week plan
- 1Weeks 1–2Refresh core data structures. Solve 2–3 easy/medium problems daily.
- 2Weeks 3–4Patterns: sliding window, graphs, DP. Start timed practice.
- 3Weeks 5–6System design fundamentals. Do one full design per day.
- 4Week 7Write behavioral stories. Do mock interviews with peers.
- 5Week 8Company-specific practice and rest before interviews.