DEV Community: Atibhi Agrawal

My Twitter Interview Experience

Atibhi Agrawal — Mon, 31 May 2021 02:59:16 +0000

Hello World,

I'm Atibhi Agrawal, I'll be graduating with an Integrated Master's in Engineering from IIIT-Bangalore in July 2021. After that, I will be joining Twitter India as a software engineer. I will be based in Bangalore.

In this blog post, I am going to tell you about the application process, interview process and the resources that I used for preparation.

Timeline

The process from the date of submitting my application to signing the offer took around 4 months. But, the time taken between the first interview and the offer confirmation was only 20 days.

Application

A friend sent me the job ID of the New Grad role and I applied on the Twitter careers page. I tried getting a referral, but an employee told me that India's new grad software engineer role wasn't accepting referrals.

I am also very active on Twitter and follow TwitterU. It is the official account of Twitter that handles everything university-related. I saw a tweet by them about a session for students. I attended the session and got to know more about student-centric opportunities at Twitter. Twitter employees also shared their own experiences, interviewing tips etc. It was a really fun and motivating session. Highly recommend students to attend this every year!

Interview Process

I got a mail from my recruiter Pascalle informing me that I had been shortlisted for the phone screen. She also sent some preparation materials for the interviews. The material was very helpful and I tried covering as many topics as I could. It also listed out the common evaluation areas for a candidate. They are problem-solving, iteration, ownership, craftsmanship, collaboration, communication, learning and adaptability. Due to signing an NDA with Twitter about the questions asked in the interviews, I will not be able to share the exact questions, however, I will try my best to give you a rough idea about them.

Phone Screen

Duration: 45 minutes

Type: Data Structures and Algorithms

Mode: Coding on Hackerrank Code Pair and Video Call via Google Meet.

Interview Experience :

The round started with introductions. The first question was on hashmaps. It could be categorized as a Leetcode Medium. Next, he asked me another question based on graphs. This could be categorized as a Leetcode Hard. I also got the opportunity to ask questions at the end.

Onsite

Duration: 45 minutes each, 3 Rounds in a single day.

Type: Data Structures and Algorithms, Computer Science Fundamentals, Behavioral

Mode: Coding on Hackerrank Code Pair and Video Call via Google Meet.

Interview Experience:

Soon after my phone screen, my on-sites were scheduled. There are a few things that are unique about the Twitter onsite:

Before the onsite, I was given the opportunity to choose the two teams that I would like to work with and my future teammates and managers interviewed me! This was great because I had the opportunity to meet them as well as ask them questions related to work.
There was a 15 min call with the HR 30 min before the first round of interview. In this call, HR explained the flow of the interviews and what the interviewers would be focusing on. I personally loved the fact that HR took out some time for this. It helped me calm my nerves significantly.
Every interview has two interviewers! I think this is to reduce bias as well as evaluate the candidate better.

There were 3 rounds of interviews on a single day.

Round-1: Data Structures and Algorithms Round. A single question based on Arrays and Maths.
Round-2: No coding in this round but was asked to write SQL queries. Questions from Operating Systems, Computer Networks, SQL and Database Management Systems were asked. System Design was also asked. Though I was not asked to design any system, I was asked questions like how do I think a particular technology is used in Twitter or how would I optimize a specific feature of Twitter.
Round-3: This was a behavioural round. Questions revolved around my past experiences, future plans and resume.

In every round, I also got the opportunity to ask questions at the end.

Final Round

Duration: 30 minutes each, 2 Rounds in a single day.

Type: Behavioral

Mode: Video Call via Google Meet.

Interview Experience :

Casual round with two people from the San Francisco office. General Chit Chat. :)

I feel that Twitter has a unique and well-thought-out interview process. Everyone I interacted with was kind and respectful. This also goes on to show the culture of the company.

Resources Used for Preparation

The resources that I have mentioned are not Twitter specific and can be used for any interviews. I had been consistent with Leetcode for the past year. Note that I did not cover all of the theory material in two weeks(from the date of the interview call to the onsite). I had been preparing since September 2020. So it took me approximately three and half months to cover everything.

Data Structures and Algorithms

Mainly Leetcode.com and Pramp.com

System Design

I have written about my preparation strategy in detail in this blog.

Operating Systems

Gate Smashers Playlist on YouTube

Operating Systems: Virtualization, Concurrency & Persistence on educative.io This is hands-down one of the best courses that I have found for OS.

Studytonight.com for quick revision.

Database Management System

Gate Smashers Playlist on YouTube

Database Design Fundamentals for Software Engineers on educative.io

Studytonight.com for quick revision.

SQL

SQL Tutorial --- Full Database Course for Beginners by Freecodecamp

Leetcode Curated 70 SQL Questions

Hackerrank SQL Questions (Couldn't complete this due to lack of time)

Computer Networks

Studytonight.com

C++ and Object-Oriented Programming

Studytonight.com

The C++ STL on geeksforgeeks

Behavioural and HR

Episode 07: Intro to Behavioural Interviews by Jackson Gabbard

Mock Interviews on Pramp.com

Final Words

I am very excited to start my journey into the tech world working as a Software Engineer for my favourite social media platform. I would like to thank my recruiter Pascalle, my future manager and my teammates for such a smooth interview process. Can't wait to #JoinTheFlock 💙

I would also like to thank my family and friends for being so supportive during the pandemic and job-hunt process. ❤️

Feel free to leave a comment, dm me on Twitter or mail me at atibhi.a@gmail.com if you have any questions about working at Twitter.

Crossposting to dev.to Made Easy

Atibhi Agrawal — Tue, 11 May 2021 12:59:16 +0000

Do you often write your articles on Google Docs, Notion or Medium and then have to manually convert it to markdown to post on dev.to?

If yes, then checkout Paste to Markdown. Simply paste any text and it will be converted to markdown along with proper formatting!

Your Guide to Software Engineering Internships

Atibhi Agrawal — Sun, 09 May 2021 10:28:12 +0000

Namaste Folks 🙏 I'm Atibhi, a final semester student from India. I've done 7 internships in 5 years. A few months ago, I gave a talk on SWE internships. This blog post is based on my talk. I share whatever I've learnt over the past few years and a few things I wish I'd known sooner. In this post I'm going to cover the following :

How to build your skills.
How should a good resume look like?
Applying to internships.
Interviewing.

How To Build Your Skills

A caveat many students face is that they say they have nothing to put on their resume. Because of this, their resume does not get shortlisted for internships. As a consequence of no internships, they are unable to improve their resume. This thought process can become a vicious cycle and lead to demotivation. Side projects, interning with Professors and taking part in competitions are great ways of showing your passion and building your resume.

(Figure 1. Building your resume. Created by Atibhi Agrawal on Canva)

How Should a Good Resume Look Like?

📝 Must Read: How to write a great resume for software engineers

🔖 Some of my favourite resume templates: Link 1, Link 2, Link 3

My personal opinion is that a resume should be neat, single page and single-column. Keep a document where you jot down every single thing you think is worth mentioning. But do not list everything on your resume, list only relevant information on your resume. After making your resume, make sure to get it reviewed by a friend or on r/resumes.

Applying to Internships

The recruiting season for summer internships starts in July/August for big companies. For startups, recruiting begins in January/February. I would recommend applying early to be on the safer side. If you're planning to do an open-source internship like Google Summer of Code or Outreachy, start contributing to an organization of your choice by December.

Remember that you will not get replies from all the companies that you apply to. To maximize your chances, keep applying to as many companies as you can. During my third year of college, I applied to 200+ startups, got 6 interview chances and 3 offers.

Applying through the website or careers page

angel. co is a great site for applying to startups. Careers page of various companies is another option. If you're applying to a startup, there is a high chance that you will get a response through the careers page. The chances are lower if you apply on the careers page of FAANG companies. A referral would be the way to go for large companies.

Asking for Referrals

Asking for referrals is a great way to get noticed at companies. But, a lot of students do not know what is the correct way to ask or whom to ask. Asking the correct people matters a lot. Here's the order in which you should reach out to people.

Friends/classmates who interned at that company.
College alumni who work at the company you want to work at.
Friends of Friends.
Random People.

A good DM also goes a long way and can be a make or break decision when someone is considering referring you. Some common mistakes are sloppy DMs, just a "Hello!" or asking someone to refer you for a role you're not a fit for. Shown below is how I request referrals from complete strangers. 😅

(Figure 2. Asking for referrals. Created by Atibhi Agrawal on Canva.)

Track Your Applications

It is very important to keep track of your applications. This way you can send reminders to people and track your progress. Use an excel sheet to keep track and pin it to your bookmarks bar!

(Figure 3. How I tracked applications on excel.)

Interviewing

Interviewing is the most important part of any application.

Before the interview

Research the company and role.
Prepare an answer to "Tell me about yourself".
Make sure you have your resume in front of yourself.
Prepare a few questions to ask the interviewer in the end.
Prepare for the technical aspect of the interview.

During the interview

Stay calm and be honest!

After the interview

Wait for updates 😶

I'm not going to deep dive into more details of interviewing. It is such a vast and important topic, it deserves a blog post of its own. Lots of wonderful people have already written blog posts. I'm going to list down some of my favourite ones in the resources section at the end.

Conclusion

Landing an internship is hard. You need a lot of patience and dedication. Don't be demotivated after facing rejections. The key is to learn from every rejection and improve. I wish you all the best in your journey!

Feel free to comment if you need further guidance or DM me on Twitter. You can also reach me at atibhi.a@gmail.com 😄

Interview Preparation Resources

How do you learn a new programming language?

Atibhi Agrawal — Sun, 02 May 2021 10:57:59 +0000

Top 5 Notion Templates

Atibhi Agrawal — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 14:25:29 +0000

According to Wikipedia,

Notion is an application that provides components such as notes, databases, kanban boards, wikis, calendars and reminders. Users can connect these components to create their own systems for knowledge management, note-taking, data management, project management, among others.

My friend introduced me to Notion a couple of years ago. Since then, my whole life is on Notion. I use it to plan my semesters, my expenses, workout routines, organize tasks, organize recipes etc.

Every once in a while, I go through my notion and delete old notes or re-organize some workplaces. During one such session, I got the idea of sharing with everyone my favourite templates.

1. Task List 🗒

Use it to organize tasks using kanban boards. Duplicate it from here. Created by Notion.

2. Week Planner ✍️

Use it to plan my week. Duplicate it from here. Created by Christian B. B. Houmann. The creator also has an awesome YouTube channel where he makes videos on Notion!

3. Quick Note 📕

A good template for beginners to understand the functionalities offered by Notion. Duplicate it from here. Created by Notion.

4. Simple Budget 💰

Use it to track monthly expenses. Duplicate it from here. Created by Notion.

5. Recipe Book 🥘

Use it to organize recipes. Duplicate it from here. Created by Philip Rau.

All the templates officially published by Notion can be found in their template gallery. Hope you found this post helpful. Feel free to comment or share your favourite templates on Notion.

How to Prepare for Your Next System Design Interview

Atibhi Agrawal — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 08:42:43 +0000

In software engineering, system design defines the components, modules, interfaces, and data for a system to meet specified requirements. Most companies do not ask system design to freshers. However, when I was interviewing for a Full-Time Software Engineer role, a few companies had system design interview rounds.
In this blog post, I will talk about the various type of system design interviews and how I prepared for them.

What Is a System Design Interview?

Typically system design interviews test candidates on their technical depth and allow them to prove their expertise in the field through real-life application of knowledge.

Some companies test you on HLD or high-level design which have questions like design Facebook or WhatsApp and you are expected to come up with the architecture.
Some ask LLD or low-level design in which you are expected to design modules and classes in a detailed manner. Some commonly asked LLD questions are Design a Parking Lot or Design a Banking Management system.
Another, third type of system design is when the interviewer asks you to design an extension of a project you have already done. Since it does not have a name, let’s name it experience related design or ERD. For example, if you’ve built a library management system for your school, the interviewer might ask you about the design decisions that you made.
Regardless of what type of interview you have HLD, LLD or ERD, the interviewer wants to test your thought process, problem-solving skills and technical knowledge.

Some companies test you on HLD or high-level design which have questions like design Facebook or WhatsApp and you are expected to come up with the architecture.

Some ask LLD or low-level design in which you are expected to design modules and classes in a detailed manner. Some commonly asked LLD questions are Design a Parking Lot or Design a Banking Management system.

Another, third type of system design is when the interviewer asks you to design an extension of a project you have already done. Since it does not have a name, let's name it experience related design or ERD. For example, if you've built a library management system for your school, the interviewer might ask you about the design decisions that you made.

Regardless of what type of interview you have HLD, LLD or ERD, the interviewer wants to test your thought process, problem-solving skills and technical knowledge.

ERD or Experience Related Design

This type of interview is my favourite as it focuses on your past experiences. They ask you questions about your work experience or an extension of a project you have done. Let me walk you through a sample question that I was asked at an interview.

Example Project From My Resume:

Built a timetable management system in Flask. The students and faculty can visualize their timetable, check for clashing courses as well as add their timetable to Google Calendar. Used pytest for unit testing. Travis builds and tests each commit to the GitHub repository. If the tests pass, it pushes the docker image to dockerhub and deploys the application to Heroku. Also setup ELK stack for monitoring and logging.

Questions Related to This:

Why did you use Flask not Django?
Did you use a database? Which database?
You built this for your college, but if you were to have a million new users overnight from various colleges, how would you scale?
Is there any single point of failure in your project?
How would you deploy this in real life? Blue-green, rolling or canary deployment? Why?

As you can see, I was not asked to design any large scale system like Facebook or Instagram but they still tested my system design knowledge. It is not necessary that you know the "correct" answers to all the questions but it is expected that you should be able to justify your own design decisions.

How To Prepare for Such Kinds of Interviews

I have come up with a 4 step plan to prepare for such kinds of interview.

In addition to this, preparing for High Level System Design interviews(more on it later in the blogpost) and studying the architecture of large scale systems like Google docs, Twitter etc helps.

HLD or High Level System Design

An HLD question aims to give the interviewee a chance to demonstrate their knowledge. There isn't a single correct answer for HLD questions, it is all about discussing the trade-offs and explaining your thought process. I won't go into the details of how to approach a system design question or an interview because there many amazing resources online(which I will list below). I would however like to share my personal 3 step plan for preparing for such types of interviews.

Preparation Strategy

I read the theory from Grokking The System Design Interview and practised a few questions from the same without looking at the solution.
I started giving mock interviews on Pramp where you can practice mock interviews for free. This was super helpful for me because I got matched with senior engineers from Zomato, Microsoft, Uber, GoJek, eBay etc who were practising their system design. The way they approached problems taught me a lot. Since I was a New Grad and my system design knowledge mostly came from Grokking, I would request them to explain some new concepts or buzzwords that they used. They were kind enough to explain it and as well provided me with valuable feedback after the interview. After one interview, a senior engineer explained how they used Message Queues in Microsoft. During my interview with a company for a New Grad Software Engineer, I was asked if I could provide examples of where I would use queues, and I told them how it is used in some large companies.

After each interview, I read up more about the problem that I solved.
I would also check out the engineering blogs of the company that I was interviewing for. Often, engineers like asking questions related to the work that they do every day.

Resources for HLD

I have compiled all the system design resources that I referred to and published them on Notion. Check them out here. You can filter them using tags. I have added "Must Do" tags for some resources that are very important.

LLD or Low Level System Design

LLD is about coming up with the class diagrams, methods, the relations between classes, program specifications and other low level details for a given system. In these type of interviews, a candidate is expected to create a modular, flexible and reusable design for software by using Object Oriented Design Principles and Design Patterns. Some popular questions are: Design a Parking Lot, Design a Banking Management System etc.

The only resources I used for LLD are :

Grokking the Object Oriented Design Interview by Educative.io
Doing all the design tagged questions on Leetcode.

Conclusion

I hope this blog post helps you in your interview preparation! Good luck with your interviews. 😃

Feel free to comment if you need further guidance or DM me on Twitter. You can also reach me at atibhi.a@gmail.com 😄

Resources

Contributing to Prometheus

Atibhi Agrawal — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 03:45:43 +0000

Hello everyone! I am Atibhi Agrawal, a final year student from IIIT-Bangalore pursuing my Integrated Masters in Technology. This blog is about my experience contributing to Prometheus as a part of my internship at Grafana Labs. It is not going to be a technical blog. The objective of this blog is to document my own journey as well as help others contribute to Prometheus or any large open source project.

Learning about Prometheus

Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit. It has a query language PromQL and a powerful data model that allows us to monitor our applications and infrastructure. In recent times, it has become the de-facto standard for application monitoring in the cloud-native space.

I had never ventured into the monitoring domain or heard about Prometheus before this internship. To get started with it, my mentors David Kitchen and Björn "Beorn" Rabenstein suggested some videos and documents that would help me learn about Prometheus.

Here are a some helpful resources :

Prometheus: A Next Generation Monitoring System

Intro: Prometheus --- Matt Layher, Fastly & Ganesh Vernekar, Grafana Labs

Prometheus Deep Dive

Official Website

Awesome Prometheus

Apart from watching videos and reading, I suggest getting your hands dirty and setting up Prometheus to gain a better understanding. Prometheus basics by yolossn is a great tutorial that was very helpful for me. After I got familiar with Prometheus, I was assigned a task. My task was to Add Backfilling support for Prometheus. The codebase of Prometheus is in Go, and since I had no prior experience with Go, I started learning the language.

Learning Golang

Whenever I learn a new programming language, I start by building a small project or follow along with interactive tutorials/videos. While coding along, I almost always run into errors. Debugging and trying to fix those errors helps me explore the language more. I also document the errors or new concepts that I come across in any programming language so that the next time something similar comes up, I can refer to my notes rather than hunt for the solution on stack overflow.

To learn Go, here are some free resources that I used :

A Tour of Go

Learn Go Programming --- Golang Tutorial for Beginners

I also made use of the free Udemy subscription offered by Grafana Labs to its employees and completed a paid course.This course was very helpful.

My first Pull request to Prometheus

After learning more about the project and the language, I started the work. I first created a design document that I mailed to the prometheus-developers mailing list. A design document is a high-level solution to a problem, it generally contains the design decisions, trade-offs and an overview of the implementation. It is similar to the concept of RFC's.

After getting approval from the Prometheus community, I started coding. I opened a PR after getting the basic structure in place. This PR certainly started small but it slowly kept growing. Initially, a few changes were requested in the PR but as the PR progressed more and more feedback was given and more changes were requested. In the end the PR had 275+ discussions. A lot of them revolved around Go and coding best practices. My mentor Beorn also sent me this when the reviews were constantly coming in.

The code reviews taught me a lot and really helped me grow. Here are some of my key learnings :

Keep PRs small.
Add lots of unit tests, this helps in avoiding bugs in production.
Learn about DRY software practice which stands for "Do not Repeat Yourself" and refers to avoiding code duplication.
Code should be modular and readable.
Searching for examples in the code base teaches the idiomatic way to do something quicker than other resources. Follow the conventions in the rest of the code base.

Finally after multiple iterations my first PR to Prometheus was merged. It was so satisfying 💃

First PR merged on Nov 26

I even got the opportunity to give a lightning talk about my work at ObservabilityCon.

The Prometheus community

Since I contributed to Prometheus as a part of my internship, I was lucky to have direct access to the Prometheus developers working at Grafana Labs whenever I had any questions. Initially, I was very hesitant to ask for help for fear of sounding stupid but my mentors Beorn, Ganesh and Goutham were very kind and encouraged me to ask questions. They answered my queries and provided me feedback that allowed me to improve.

We also set up a common time every week with the CNCF mentee Jess, who was working on something similar at the time, and Bartek, another Prometheus developer, to discuss anything that might be blocking us. They were also very kind and helpful and I enjoyed interacting with them. I really thank them for their time and help.

If you are an external contributor, there are many options as well, like the Prometheus contributor hours every Monday where anyone contributing to Prometheus can join in to ask for help when facing an issue. One can also hop on to IRC: #prometheus on irc.freenode.net (for the easiest start, join via Element) which is more for users. Developers can ask for help on #prometheus-dev on IRC. Most of the maintainers are friendly and encouraging.

Final Thoughts

I learnt a lot by contributing to Prometheus. It gave me an opportunity to learn about monitoring, distributed systems, Go, cloud-native technologies etc. Prometheus is a popular open-source project that takes part in the Google Summer of Code and Cloud Native Computing Foundation Mentorship program every year and I highly recommend you to contribute to the project. It will hopefully be a good learning experience for you too.

Feel free to comment if you need further guidance or DM me on Twitter. You can also reach me at atibhi.a@gmail.com 😄

Impostor Syndrome

Atibhi Agrawal — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 03:39:28 +0000

During my college years, I was driven, hard-working and ambitious. If you looked at my LinkedIn you would think I had it all --- great internships, open source contributions, volunteer work etc. However, I was never truly happy, I always felt that I did not deserve any of the good things that were happening to me. I attributed all my achievements to luck.

My feelings intensified during my first week of my summer internship at Google. Everyone around me was super smart. They had studied from the top universities in the world or had a resume that was in the top 1% of Computer Science students. I was not from a top college, heck, I wasn't even a Computer Science student, what was I doing amongst them? I was confident that I would fail at this internship and would not be able to complete my project. I reached out to my college senior who had been working at the same company for quite some time with my concerns, he told me point blank, "This is Impostor Syndrome".

He helped me by telling me his own experiences and sending me resources about it. I cannot say that I no longer suffer from Impostor Syndrome, however I have learned to manage it and do not let it affect my normal life. In this post, I hope to share my experiences and observations about it.

What Is The Impostor Syndrome?

The American Pyschological Association describes it as :

First described by psychologists Suzanne Imes, PhD, and Pauline Rose Clance, PhD, in the 1970s, impostor phenomenon occurs among high achievers who are unable to internalise and accept their success. They often attribute their accomplishments to luck rather than to ability, and fear that others will eventually unmask them as a fraud.

Though the impostor phenomenon isn't an official diagnosis listed in the DSM, psychologists and others acknowledge that it is a very real and specific form of intellectual self-doubt. Impostor feelings are generally accompanied by anxiety and, often, depression.

If you've ever felt like a fraud, doubted your skills, attributing every achievement to luck --- you have most likely suffered from impostor syndrome at some time. Most people at some point in their careers have felt undeserving of their success. Though this syndrome is universal, age, race, and gender play a big part.

Acknowledging It and the Road to Recovery

After my senior told me that I suffered from impostor syndrome, I started noticing the unhealthy behavioral patterns I had.

If I achieved anything, I would guard that good news with secrecy for the fear that people would confirm what I already knew, that I wasn't good enough. When asked to review code, even if I would be 100% sure that the other person needed improvement, I wouldn't point it out until it was an obvious mistake. Tech isn't easy, coding is hard, understanding huge codebases in a new language takes time. Even after knowing this, whenever I would be given a new task, my first reaction would be self-doubt and anxiety of whether I would be able to do it or not. If I cracked an interview, I thought it was because the interviewer asked me things that I knew! I was turning into a workaholic and heading towards burnout because I believed that I would have to work extra hard to prove I was worthy. I also suffered from anxiety.

After acknowledging that I had a problem, I started working towards changing my behavioural patterns. Here are some things that helped me :

Coming clean about it to my manager. When he heard how I felt, he told me how this mentality would hold me back if I did not work on it. A conversation with him really really helped me come to terms with my feelings and work on them. Forever grateful to him. However, I was lucky that my manager understood me. Some managers might react otherwise and think you actually do not know your stuff. Instead of telling them you feel like an impostor, a better idea would be to ask for feedback regularly. Another thing you could do is talk to a mentor or senior you trust.
I am an organizer and planner. If I have anything major coming up, be it a project or an interview, I will almost always have a page on Notion where I list down how I plan to accomplish it and my progress. After I achieve something, I go back to that page and think about the hours that I put in, the effort that went into the task, and remind myself that I deserve it.
Life experiences helped as well. When I heard the Principal Engineer cooly tell the team that he did not know the answer and would get back later, it had a deep impact on me. Everyone isn't supposed to know everything. Asking for help is OK.
Whenever I am given a new challenging task, I think of the past and how I have tackled other tasks successfully. That comforts me and strengthens my self-confidence.

These things might not help everyone but it might be worth a try to see if they make you feel better. Talking to a mentor and reading blogs is also very helpful. Some awesome blogs that I discovered are :

Official Article by American Psychological Association.
The VP of Engineering at dropbox also talks about his experience in this blogpost.
What is Impostor Syndrome ? on FreeCodeCamp.
Just search for the keyword impostor syndrome on medium, there are tons of blogs.

You're Not Alone, You Got This

According to a report by Blind (2018), 58% of tech employees report experiencing Imposter Syndrome currently in their careers. This report includes employees from Google, Apple, Facebook, and Uber, which are some of the world's largest tech giants. The Cut's article where 25 Famous Women talk about Impostor Syndrome goes a long way in showing that anyone and at any stage of life can feel this way.

YOU'RE DEFINITELY NOT ALONE :)

Through this post, I hoped to show you that Impostor Syndrome is very common in the tech world and not very difficult to overcome.

Always remember, you deserve everything that you get and you deserve to be happy!

How I Prepared for the Google Internship Interview.

Atibhi Agrawal — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 03:32:08 +0000

Hey everyone, I'm Atibhi, I interned with Google as a Summer Intern in 2020. After I got the internship, a lot of people asked me about my preparation strategy.

In this blog post, I have tried to clear some of the common questions every student has regarding interview preparation. I have also included resources that helped me during my preparation!

My site of choice - Leetcode

I have explored many sites and in the end, I found Leetcode to be the best.
Sites like CodeChef, Codeforces, SPOJ are really good but they are not interview/job-focused, they lean more towards competitive programming. If your aim is to go compete at ACM ICPC, by all means, practice at those sites.
For interview preparation, the top sites are Leetcode, GeeksForGeeks and Interview Bit. Leetcode beats the other two sites hands down. While the theory in GeeksForGeeks is good (it is often coded inefficiently) and their practice platform has weak test cases. InterviewBit has a good collection of questions but their list is limited, also they do not have a vibrant community.
Leetcode has everything that a good site should, an amazing list of questions, good editorials, really good test cases as well as a community(best thing). The discussion section has amazing discussions, sometimes the solutions here are better than those in the editorial.

I Am Intimidated by the List of Questions, Where Should I Start?

First and foremost, there is no reason to be intimidated, we all have to start somewhere :) If you are a complete beginner, start with Top 100 Liked Questions and Top Interview Questions. Sort them by difficulty level and do the easy ones, followed by medium and then hard.

How Should I Solve Each Question?

Everyone has a different way of approaching problems, I initially looked up the solution to every problem but when I gave the Weekly Contests(another amazing feature! more about it later) I realized my technique wasn't working. I then thought about a question and worked out a basic algorithm and then coded. If it took more than a certain amount of time, I saw the solution. I also went through Leetcode discuss to see different approaches.
Here is a curated list of "how to Leetcode" from various people, do give it a read! It is helpful :

How Do I Measure My Performance, I Am Solving Questions but Am I Improving?

ONE WORD - WEEKLY CONTESTS. Initially, when I started giving weekly contests I would not be able to solve even a single question, but with practice, I started solving two to three. It motivated me to work harder every week and manage time better. I also maintained an excel sheet where I kept track of the questions that I solved in contests.

How my contest excel sheet looked like.

How "MANY" Questions Should I Solve?

It is not about the number of questions rather it is about "how" well you understand the concepts and are able to approach new problems. In spite of that, doing the Top Interview Questions should be a must.

Other Tips

Read as many interview experiences of people as you can from Leetcode Discuss.
Ask doubts in Leetcode Discuss for each question.
If your interview is nearing, take Leetcode Premium and do company-wise questions (very helpful).

What are the important topics I should study ?

Big O Notation

Theory
Practice problems from Cracking the Coding Interview

Arrays and Maths

Practice a lot of Questions on Arrays and Maths. Some important topics are mentioned below.
Circular Arrays - Typical ways to solve on Leetocode
Boyer Moore Voting Algorithm Leetcode
Two Sum Problem - Leetcode
Three Sum Problem - Leetcode
Four Sum Problem - Leetcode
Buy and Stock problem - Leetcode
Buy and Stock problem II - Leetcode
Buy and Stock problem III - Leetcode
Buy and Stock problem IV - Leetcode
Buy and Stock With Cooldown - Leetcode
Questions relating to Palindromes.
Longest Palindromic Subsequence
Finding square root of a number in logn time - Leetcode
Subarray and Subsequence problems.

Binary Search

Binary Search from Topcoder(MUST)

Bitwise manipulation

Trees

Pre-order(BOTH recursive and iterative)
Post-order(BOTH recursive and iterative
In-order(BOTH recursive and iterative
N-ary Tree Pre-order Traversal
N-ary Tree Pre-order Traversal
N-ary Tree Level Order Traversal
Maximum Depth of N-ary Tree
Serialization and deserialization of trees - Leetcode
Binary Search Tree
Lowest Common Ancestor - Leetcode
Morris In-order traversal by Tushar Roy (Video)
Threaded Binary Tree

Recursion and Backtracking

Graphs

Representing graphs
DFS, BFS Explanation by csgator(BEST)
Topological Sorting
Prims and Kruskal
Dijikstra
Dijkstra on sparse graphs - Competitive Programming Algorithms
Number of Islands
Friend Circles
Decode String

Geometry

Geometric Algorithms - GeeksforGeeks

Hashing

Linked List

Insertion
Deletion of Node
Reverse Linked List (iterative and recursive)
Circular Linked List
Doubly Linked List
Floyd's Cycle Detection Algorithm
Linked List Cycle - Leetcode
LRU Cache - C++ Implementation - Bhrigu Srivastava
Copy list with random-pointer (BEAUTIFUL QUESTION!)

Dynamic Programming

TopCoder Article (VERY IMPORTANT!!! MUST)
Top 20 DP questions(Geeks for geeks) Important!
Tushar Roy DP playlist
Do Questions from Interview Bit (Good List) :P
Top 50 DP questions
Difference between DP and Divide and Conquer

Disjoint Set Union

DSU CP-Algorithm

Sorting

Be clear with the basic algorithm and time complexity of all sorting algorithms.
Additionally read up to count sort, bucket sort and radix sort.

Greedy

Basics of Greedy

System Design

For now, these are the topics that I feel are important for an interview, obviously, this is not an exhaustive list :)

Google Specific Interview Tips

Practice coding on google docs.
Write variable and function names that are descriptive.
Be honest. Do not bluff.
Be vocal, explain your approach while coding.
Give a lot of mock interviews to friends in a real environment.
Do a lot of leetcode.
Be confident!

Hope this blog post helped you! All the best! Feel free to comment if you need further guidance or DM me on Twitter. You can also reach me at atibhi.a@gmail.com 😄