Inside the Fivetran engineering interview loop
7 min read A walk through Fivetran’s recruiter screen, its two coding challenges, the design round, and how to prep for each. Read article
Interview Prep
Coding Interview Questions
Where SQL joins quietly go wrong in interviews
6 min read The join behaviors that trip up strong candidates: WHERE-versus-ON filtering, fan-out inflating aggregates, NULL traps in anti-joins, and self-joins. Read article
Coding Interview Questions
Where SQL window functions quietly go wrong in interviews
7 min read The ranking, framing, and ordering gotchas that separate people who have shipped SQL from people who memorized the syntax. Read article
Coding Interview Questions
The debugging interview and how not to freeze in it
6 min read Companies increasingly hand candidates a broken repo and a failing test instead of a blank editor, and the round rewards a very different skill than grinding LeetCode. Read article
Coding Interview Questions
The trick to Word Break is spotting the repeated work
6 min read Word Break looks like a string problem but rewards you for caching subproblems by start index, from the memoized recursion to the trie follow-up. Read article
Coding Interview Questions
How the sliding window solves Longest Substring Without Repeats
6 min read The two-pointer window that turns a quadratic substring scan into one linear pass, plus the stale-index guard that quietly breaks the fast version. Read article
Coding Interview Questions
Valid Parentheses is a stack problem in disguise
5 min read The balanced-brackets question is a stack in disguise, and the same move carries straight into Min Stack and Decode String. Read article
Coding Interview Questions
Why greedy fails on Coin Change, and the DP that fixes it
5 min read Greedy returns the wrong coin count the moment denominations aren’t standard, so Coin Change needs a short dynamic-programming table instead. Read article
Algorithms
How time complexity actually grows when n gets big
5 min read Big-O answers one question, what the running time does when you double the input, and the gap between O(n log n) and O(n squared) at scale is where coding interviews are won or lost. Read article
Interview Prep
Build a coding interview study plan around the hours you have
6 min read How to size a coding interview prep schedule to the weeks and hours you actually have, and what to cut when the week falls apart. Read article
Coding Interview Questions
What the Course Schedule problem is actually testing
6 min read Course Schedule and its harder sibling are dressed-up cycle detection on a directed graph, and there are two clean ways to handle both. Read article
Coding Interview Questions
Number of Islands solved three ways, and the follow-ups
7 min read The grid-counting question turns up everywhere from Google to Citadel, and the part that gets scored is the follow-up, not the first solution. Read article
Coding Interview Questions
The sort-then-sweep trick behind merge intervals
6 min read How sorting by start time turns merge intervals, insert interval, and meeting rooms into one linear sweep. Read article
Coding Interview Questions
Trapping Rain Water, from brute force to two pointers
6 min read The trapped-water problem has three standard solutions, and the gap between them is what an interviewer is actually grading. Read article
Coding Interview Questions
Designing an LRU cache that actually runs in O(1)
7 min read Why LeetCode 146 forces a hash map paired with a doubly linked list, how to code it cleanly, and where the LFU and TTL follow-ups go. Read article
