Technical Interview Coding Best Practices

When to use: Sorted arrays, palindromes, pairs with target sum

💡 Tip: Start from both ends or use fast/slow pointers

When to use: Subarrays, substrings, consecutive elements

💡 Tip: Track window state efficiently; expand/contract as needed

When to use: Sorted data, search space reduction, finding boundaries

💡 Tip: Not just for finding elements—use for optimization problems

When to use: Trees, graphs, matrices, implicit graphs

💡 Tip: BFS for shortest path; DFS for exhaustive exploration

When to use: Optimal substructure, overlapping subproblems

💡 Tip: Start with recursion + memoization, then optimize to tabulation

When to use: Permutations, combinations, constraint satisfaction

💡 Tip: Generate candidates incrementally; prune invalid branches early