Ace Your Coding Interview & Land Your Dream Developer Job

Create a portfolio website with: a list of projects, your resume, and a photo of your beautiful mug.

Use Github Pages (Octopress/Jekyll) or Wordpress for your site, consider a custom domain.

Start blogging—write about your interview prep, practice problems you do, notes from courses. Host on your site or e.g. CoderWall.

Have a personal website you'd like feedback on? Send it to the instructors/students for review!

Hands-on To Dos:

Get a GitHub account and push something there. Some ideas: Code interview solution code, even snowboarding videos.

Get and update your LinkedIn: list jobs, connect with coworkers, update to a nice photo, ask for recommendations.

(Optional) Get an account on StackOverflow: ask and answer some questions.

Beware of tweets: Be sure you keep your tweets professional or keep separate personal (#yolo) / professional (#knuthswag) accounts—and link to the professional one from your portfolio/LinkedIn.

1. Cover letters are important
2. Research the company you're applying to
3. Use the standard structure for your letter
   1. Paragraph 1: Introduction
   2. Paragraph 2-3: Why you're a good fit
   3. Paragraph 4: Closing, call-to-action
4. Have someone review your letter

Topics covered:

1. Choosing the language—choose what you're comfortable with, lean towards language used at company

2. Once you've chosen—practice with that language—and only that language!

Solid choices: Java, C / C++ / C#, Python, Javascript, even Ruby

Company leanings:

Facebook: PHP

Google: C/C++, Java, Python Javascript

Amazon: mostly Java, Javascript, tiny bit of Ruby

In this lecture, I cover the 7 essential steps to approaching a problem, finding a solution—and coding it up without making any avoidable mistakes.

Practice problem: given a linked list, return that linked list with the order of all nodes reversed.

Write a function which, given a linked list, returns whether that linked list contains a cycle.

E.g., given the following linked list, your function will say "yes, this contains a cycle".

               E             /  ^           v    | A -> B -> C -> D 

That is, where traversing would result in C -> D -> E -> C -> D -> E

For this question, you will parse a string to determine if it contains only "balanced delimiters."

A balanced delimiter starts with an opening character ((, [, {), ends with a matching closing character (), ], }respectively), and has only other matching delimiters in between. A balanced delimiter may contain any number of balanced delimiters.

Given an array of integers and a target integer sum, return whether there exist a pair of integers in the array which add up to sum.

See if you can come up with an O(n^2) solution first. Then—can you come up with an O(n log n) one?

Implement a stack which keeps track of its minimum value.

Challenge: can you keep the operation time complexity to O(1)?

Hint: Try using some extra space. What data structure might work for keeping track of minimums?

Given a binary search tree, return its height—that is, the maximum depth reached by the tree.

Example: given a BST with a single node, your function would return 0.

Given a linear BST with only right side nodes 0 -> 1 -> 2 -> (null), where 2 is the tail, your function would return a max height of 2.

Hint: BSTs are a recursively defined data structure.

Hint #2: which tree traversal method covered in the traversal lecture might come in handy here?

  Given a binary search tree root, count the total number of nodes in the tree.

Try the problem simultaneously called "offensive", "an insult to my dignity", and "a must-ask".

Write a function that, given n, returns n!

In this lecture we talk about why reviewing hash tables is important, reading quotes from Dan Blumenthal of TripAdvisor, Steve Yegge from Amazon/Google, and Cracking the Coding Interview.