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Ana María Díaz
Ana María Díaz

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How to prepare for your first tech interview?

In tech industry a requirement to get a job is to pass successfully the tech interview, there are many guides outside but based on my persona l experience I’m gonna give you some advices.

Get back to fundamentals

Sometimes, when we’re preparing for a tech interview we only focus on algorithms and data structures and coding challenges but we don’t practice the theory. It is also important to focus on practicing CS fundamentals here’s a list of topics that I’ve been studying for my interview:

  • Object Oriented Programming
  • Software Engineering
  • Programing paradigms
  • Testing
  • Sorting algorithms
  • Optimization
  • Big O Notation

Of course there are a lot of subtopics inside that topics, for example: Polymorphism, Abstraction, Encapsulation and Inheritance are related to OOP.

Practicing the for the coding challenge

There are many sites where you can study algorithms and data structures for free including video tutorials explaining more specifically how it works. This week I’ve been practicing arrays and strings on Hackerrank. Also Leetcode have a lot of problems and you can filter them by the most popular ones.
I’ll recommend you to solve at least 20-30 problems from different difficulty and data structures to crack the coding interview.
Books: Cracking the coding interview is like the bible of technical challenges, it explains a lot of topics and it’s going to be your best friend for practicing exercises for the coding challenge.

Always try to practice with someone mocking interviews and relax, rest enough days before your interview. This point is very important because sometimes being nervous can be a big blocker. On the next weeks I’m going to be practicing more for my technical interviews.

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