Demystifying LeetCode

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When I started applying for software engineering roles again, one thing became clear very quickly: almost everyone was running the same gauntlet. A LeetCode-style coding challenge as an early gate, a system design round, and only after surviving both did you get to talk to actual humans about actual engineering.

That pushed me to embark on a journey of learning as much as I possibly could about these problems.

The uncomfortable truth is that after twenty-plus years of writing software professionally, most of these data structures and algorithms were things I was familiar with – I could tell you what a trie was, explain when a heap beat a sorted list, sketch Floyd’s cycle detection on a whiteboard – but that I almost never had a use for in my day-to-day work. Business software spends most of its life in CRUD, integration and orchestration. The framework hands you the dictionary; you don’t implement one. It turns out that “learned it in a lecture hall decades ago” and “can produce working code under interview pressure in forty minutes” are very different claims, and the gap between them only grows with every year you spend shipping systems rather than studying them.

Leetcode on Maceage's Blog

Demystifying LeetCode