Notes on coding interviews — from Fin and Coco.
Blind 75, Grind 75, LeetCode 75, NeetCode 150 — pick by timeline, walk pattern-first, use a 20-minute peek rule, and re-do until shaky problems go quiet. A strategy guide, not a dump.
Contiguous subarrays and substrings where you update state in O(1) per move. Fixed vs variable shapes, the expand-shrink-update template, RFCs and production rate limiters that use the same idea.
One structural oddity per company that generic LeetCode prep misses, plus the sentence to say out loud when you recognize it. Sourced where we have public pages; dossier synthesis labeled as editorial.
The hard part isn't the syntax. Recursion asks you to trust a function you haven't finished writing. Here's the leap — and when to stop tracing.
How to prep Microsoft’s As-Appropriate round: say the decision, the trade-off, and how you checked risk — so the judgment still holds when you come back to it.
What the live bug-bash round scores, the Stripe-shaped failure modes to check first, and a 60-minute narration loop so your judgment stays legible under pressure.
Which Leadership Principles show up for SWEs, how to build a reusable story bank, and the follow-ups that break rehearsed answers. Grounded in Amazon’s official LP pages and Bar Raiser write-ups.
Two Sum is the fixed playground problem for that — not a generic demo loop.
