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How I Finally Learnt to Solve Coding Interview Questions

Cathy Lai on September 16, 2026

So you have an algorithmic coding interview coming up... You know the standard advice: think out loud, talk as you code, and don't worry about opti...
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FrancisTRᴅᴇᴠ •

I would say if you are practicing technical interviews, although GPT and recording yourself is helpful, see if you can find a person that has been in the job for a long time to practice with. You get even more insights on their feedback since they have been in the process before and will provide you really helpful tips on solving problems. Even better, a good practice on behavior interviews as well and things to look for. Thanks for sharing Cathy!

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Cathy Lai •

Yes that is a great tip. Having a person next to you to watch you will really help a lot! Especially another senior engineer who has hired someone before.

Thanks for your encouragement!

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Cathy Lai •

Update: I am now getting into the final interview (the 4th one) and preparing to travel onsite now! :)

These methods had helped me and hope they help you too!

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Elmar Chavez •

As someone who records himself and rewatches the recording to critic it, I approve of this. The list you gave is so true and I can attest to that. I've been constantly improving myself by explaining my thought process ever since early February this year. Also the output printing for every step is so relatable. I do mine by printing it every time in the console using console.log() (that's why I always use VS code to easily see the output in the terminal whenever I do coding challenges.

There's one thing I want to add though. The platform where I'm doing these coding challenges is CodeWars and after completing a challenge, the site would allow me to see other people's solution. This is where I practice reading other people's code and explaining it out loud too. I also point out good and bad practices used as if I am explaining it to a co-developer. I think this helped me a lot too so if you ever got a chance to see other people's approaches, you can do this method as well (I only review one everyday and for me that's already a huge game changer).

PS. Just finished recording my daily challenge today!

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Cathy Lai •

Thank you so much for sharing your experiences😀! It’s encouraging to hear that recording yourself and explaining your thought process has helped you too.

I really like your idea of reviewing other people’s solutions and explaining their choices out loud as if speaking to a co-developer. That adds another important skill: learning to read, evaluate and discuss unfamiliar code—which is very relevant to real interviews as well. I definitely will give that a try and share it here.

Congratulations on finishing today’s recording too! 👍

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Doug •

I have been looking at using AI agents to pick up new programming languages, and to focus in on learning specific engineering areas and topics.

How have you been prompting it to give you exercises with progressing complexity/difficulty? Because my experience so far is that it is pretty spotty in terms of difficulty progression and REALLY struggles to keep the tasks limited to the concepts I have already been taught.

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Cathy Lai •

Hi! Yes, using AI to study a language is a great method—it's a very patient teacher! 😄

When practicing interview questions, I start with the simplest one first. (I use ChatGPT Plus).

  • I keep all my questions organized in a project.
  • I make sure to start a new conversation for each coding question.
  • I copy and paste my solution for ChatGPT to critique.
  • It learns what I did wrong and understands where I struggled.
  • For the next question, it takes those insights into account.
  • I also prompt it with my desired difficulty level.

I find this approach works really well! After a few repetitions, it gets pretty smart at tailored question generation.

Hope this helps!

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Mika Flowers •

Fantastic advice. Building healthy habits around the technical side of problem-solving really helps too!! especially when it comes to staying consistent under pressure.

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Cathy Lai •

Very important point! Go for walks before I attempt these coding exercises seemed to really help 😀