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Crack Coding Interviews by Building These 5 Real-World Features
Today, we’ll prep for coding interviews a bit differently and build five real-world features for companies like Netflix and Facebook
Preparing for coding interviews is no easy task. You need the skills to break down the problem and to deploy the right tools. The Educative Team has always been on the mission to make coding interview prep more accessible for engineers. We’ve learned firsthand that the best way to succeed is not to memorize 1,500+ LeetCode problems.
That’s why we want to approach interview prep a bit differently today by tackling some real-world problems faced by tech companies. Learning how to build real-world features (e.g. how to merge recommendations on Amazon) is more fun, and it’s much easier to remember what you learned that way. If you can understand a problem’s underlying pattern, you can apply it to just about any question.
We will dive into the solutions for a few common real-world coding problems and build five features. We will offer our solutions in Java.
This tutorial at a glance:
- Netflix feature: Group similar titles (hashmaps)
- Facebook feature: Friend circles (DFS)
- Google Calendar feature: Find meeting rooms (Heaps)
- Amazon feature: Products in price range (BST)
- Twitter feature: Add likes (Strings)
- Where to go from here
1. Netflix Feature: Group Similar Titles (hash maps)
Netflix is one of the biggest video streaming platforms out there. The Netflix engineering team is always looking for new ways to display content. For this first problem, imagine you’re a developer on this team.
Task: Our task here is to improve search results by enabling users to see relevant search results without being hindered by typos. We are calling this the “Group Similar Titles” feature.
First, we need to determine how to individually group any character combination for a given title. Let’s imagine that our library has the following titles: "duel," "dule," "speed,"…
