Interview - Preparation

# Emphasized the following topics for DSA round

Graph: BFS, DFS, Topological sort, Shortest Path
Tree: Binary tree, Binary search Tree, N child tree
Trie: Prefix search, Word search with counts
Disjoint set union
Heap: Median in a stream, Sliding window maximum, Top k elements
Binary Search: Lower bound, Upper bound, Questions where binary search is not the obvious choice
Sliding window and 2 pointers based questions
Dynamic programming
Strings: KMP, String sorting
Adhoc questions on the application of Array, Stack, Queue, HashMap, TreeMap

Read a few research papers:
– Amazon Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-Value Store
– The Google File System
– Spanner: Google’s Globally Distributed Database
– Cassandra — A Decentralized Structured Storage System
– MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters
– Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data
Practiced popular system design problems like designing a URL shortening service, Pastebin, Instagram, Dropbox, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, YouTube/Netflix, Typeahead Suggestion, API Rate Limiter, Twitter Search.
Practiced system design for some Google products, including Google Search, YouTube, Google Photo Sharing and Storage, Google Docs, Google Drive.
Revised system design concepts such as CAP and PACELC theroem, SQL vs No-SQL, Types of No-SQL databases and their applications, Consistent Hashing, Bloom Filters, Load Balancers, Horizontal Scaling, Caching, Database Partitioning/Sharding, Indexes, Rate Limiting, Distributed Queues, Request Deduplication.
Watched few YouTube videos on system design.

Develop a solid grasp of data structures and their applications. Tree questions were a recurring theme in three rounds of my interview.
Google emphasizes the quality of your solution, unlike META, where speed is the primary focus.
The responses to follow-up questions carry significant weight.
Be prepared for lengthy problems and writing substantial code during the interview.
Some follow-up questions may delve into complexities related to implementing your solution in a production environment.

Interviewing is a skill and it does not reflect how good you are as a software engineer
- learn how to master it
- apply it in a simulated environment
- reflect on feedback
Your job is to convice whoever is interviewing you that you can do the job
Each interview is an encapsulated experience
do as many interviews as possible, starting form the lowest priority ones
try to align your top-tier companies’ timelines as closely as possible
do not let other people experience affect your view of your own process
pay for mock interviews