Technical interviews often don’t hinge on obscure tricks—they hinge on execution: clarifying, communicating, and testing. Here’s a practical playbook you can use in your next coding interview (or mock) to perform better on both “easy” and “medium” problems.

1) Nail the first 2 minutes (most people waste them)

Before touching code, do three things:

• Restate the problem in your own words (confirms understanding).
• Ask 2–3 clarifying questions (inputs, constraints, edge cases).
• Propose a high-level approach (even if it’s a first draft).

Pro tip: If you’re unsure about constraints, say: “I’ll assume n can be large, so I’ll aim for better than O(n²) if possible.” This signals good engineering instincts.

2) Use a repeatable problem-solving structure

When you get stuck, fall back on a checklist:

• Can I solve it with a brute force approach first? (Then optimize.)
• Is there a data structure that fits? (hash map, stack, heap, two pointers)
• Is there a pattern? (sliding window, BFS/DFS, prefix sums, monotonic stack)
• What are the invariants? (What must remain true each iteration?)

Quick pattern prompts

• “Need fastest lookups?” → hash map / set
• “Subarray / substring constraints?” → sliding window / prefix sums
• “Next greater / previous smaller?” → monotonic stack
• “Shortest path / levels?” → BFS

3) Communicate like a teammate, not a test-taker

Interviewers score your reasoning as much as correctness.

• Speak in small, confident steps: “I’ll store counts in a map; then scan once…”
• Call out tradeoffs: time vs. space, readability vs. micro-optimizations.
• If you make a mistake, narrate the fix: “That fails when the array is empty—I'll guard it.”

4) Write code with guardrails

Avoid “silent” bugs by building safety into your process:

• Start with function signature + examples
• Add edge-case checks early (empty input, one element, duplicates)
• Use meaningful variable names (it reduces logic errors)

5) Test like you mean it (before they do)

Do a quick testing sweep out loud:

• A normal case
• An edge case
• A “stress” mindset case (large input, repeated values)

Mini-script: “Let’s run through a small example step-by-step to validate.”

If you want to practice this, try recording yourself solving one problem and scoring yourself on: clarity, structure, correctness, and testing.

What part do you find hardest in technical interviews right now—clarifying, choosing the right pattern/data structure, or debugging under time pressure?