The 4-Week Interview Sprint
For engineers with a loop on the calendar and four weeks to prepare.
A dense, ordered sprint: week one drills the coding patterns, week two the harder graph and DP problems, week three switches to system design, and week four handles the behavioral round, resume and offer. Every coding step is runnable.
- Pattern-match coding problems instead of re-deriving them
- Implement the graph and DP patterns interviewers reuse
- Run a 45-minute system-design round with structure
- Tell tight behavioral stories and negotiate the offer
Two Sum
Week 1 — warm up and the hashing pattern.
The Closing Gap: Two Pointers
The two-pointer pattern, visualized.
Valid Parentheses
Stacks, the interview way.
The Moving Frame: Sliding Window
The window pattern that turns O(n²) into O(n).
3Sum
Combine sorting with two pointers.
Binary Search: The Vault
Week 2 — the pattern hiding in half of all “optimize” questions.
BFS: The Flood
Grid and graph traversal — BFS.
Build Order: DFS & Topological Sort
DFS plus ordering dependencies.
Dijkstra’s Shortest Paths
Shortest path, implemented.
The Loaded Bag: 0/1 Knapsack
The DP pattern interviewers love.
Fill the Grid, Walk It Back: Longest Common Subsequence
The other DP they love — and diffing.
LRU Cache
The most-asked design-flavored coding question.
The System Design Fundamentals Handbook
Week 3 — switch gears: the SD vocabulary.
Design a URL Shortener
A gentle full-loop system-design walkthrough.
50 System Design Interview Questions
How to run the 45-minute SD round.
The Behavioral Interview Handbook
Week 4 — STAR stories that don’t ramble.
The Resume & Portfolio Handbook
Get past the screen.
The Salary Negotiation Handbook
Don’t leave money on the table.