If you're a skilled software developer, then technical coding interviews are the biggest hurdle between you and a FAANG job that'll make you a millionaire within 5 years, and yet they're the most contencious topic amongst software developers.
So in 2020, I decided to get good at FAANG interviews. I started by reading the most common textbooks, learning a lot about time complexity analysis, arrays, stacks, linked lists, hahes, trees, graphs, recursion, dynamic programming, bit manipulation, optimisation, backtracking, depth first searches, breadth first searches, sorting etc.
I started doing Mock interviews on Pramp, and the feedback was good. I started taking mock interviews on Leetcode.com and landed somewhere between a Facebook and a Google employee. I then sat back and wondered: can the process be easier?
I re-watched the hundreds of animations and algorithm walkthroughs i'd created using my iPad, and suddenly it dawned on me: yes, it can be made a lot easier.
Step 1/ make it visual. There aren't any proper graphics when you have to learn these concepts, or the graphics are at best a second thought, yet the vast majority of the time, just seeing what the algorithm is doing all that's required to understand it, and remember it. What if everything was beautifully animated, and i really mean everything.
Step 2/ Richard Feynman, one of the greatest physicists of our time, had a method for learning. What if the material followed the same principle, and was tested on regular folks first, revised, simplified, and then retargetted for developers.
So i got to work, and started creating content following these two key principles as my mantra. Whether simple pramp array algorithms, pre-order, in-order and post-order tree traversals, depth first searches in matrices, dynamic programming problems explained using simple physical analogies, complex string dynamic programming problems such as computing the Levenshtein distance, explained visually, and clearly, a 2000 year old algorithm for computing primes efficiently, finding the optimal time to buy and sell stocks, or writing a highly efficient algorithm for solving Sudoku.
Guess what: it works. Explaining things visually, and simply means you can cover far more, far more quickly. Who would of have thought.
I invite you to come and join me on pythonical.org. My aim is to create the best course to get developers up to speed and ready to join the FAANG company of their dreams.