Interview Templates

Introduction

In a high-pressure 45-minute coding interview, you do not have time to invent algorithms from scratch. You must have standard templates memorized perfectly.

When you recognize a pattern, your hands should automatically type out the skeleton of the solution before you even fully process the specific edge cases of the problem.

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The Muscle Memory Advantage

Memorizing these templates gives you three massive advantages: 1. Speed: You can type out the core structure in 30 seconds. 2. Bug Prevention: These templates have been designed to avoid classic off-by-one errors and infinite loops (especially in Binary Search and Linked Lists). 3. Cognitive Offloading: Once the skeleton is on the screen, your brain is free to focus 100% of its energy on the specific business logic required for the question, rather than worrying about pointer math.

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The Templates Included

We have distilled the most robust, Pythonic templates for: - Sliding Window (Variable size with left/right pointers) - Two Pointers (Converging and Fast/Slow) - Binary Search (The exact while left <= right: formulation) - DFS / Backtracking (Recursive skeleton) - BFS (Level-order queue processing) - Graphs (Adjacency list construction and traversal) - Heaps (Top-K tracking) - Dynamic Programming (Top-Down with @cache)

Study these until you can write them on a whiteboard without thinking.