How to Prep for a Coding Interview Fast
If you’re a working professional with a coding interview coming up, you’re in the right place. This fast track cuts out the grind and focuses on the high-yield techniques and patterns that appear most often in real coding interviews. Prep shouldn’t be a full-time job. You can and should be ready in just a few focused hours.
If you’ve got at least a week to prepare, or you’re still working on your fundamentals, we suggest going through our full Software Engineering Coding Questions course. It dives much deeper into all the key topics and has a lot more practice questions.
Why this fast track is different
You’ll get everything distilled into code examples, common pitfalls, and quick-reference cheatsheets, plus targeted advice and practice on the live coding essentials interviewers care about:
- Structuring your thoughts before coding
- Asking clarifying questions
- Handling edge cases
- Explaining time and space complexity
Feeling ready already? Schedule a mock interview with a peer right now to test yourself and shake those pre-interview jitters!
How to use this module
If you’ve prepared for coding interviews before and already feel confident with the basics, you can skip Basic 1. That said, we still recommend spending ~15 minutes there to quickly refresh important edge cases.
Estimated time commitment and study flow (including a few embedded practice problems):
- Basic 1: Arrays, Two Pointers, Stack, and Sliding Window → ~30 min
- Basic 2: Binary Search, Heaps & Intervals → ~45 min
- Intermediate: Linked Lists, Trees & Tries → ~1.5 hrs
- Advanced: Backtracking, Graphs & DP → ~2 hrs
- General Framework: How to Answer Any Coding Interview Question → ~15 min
- Final step: Do at least one mock interview before your actual interview
On interview day, review your edge case checklist, coding patterns cheatsheet, and problem-solving framework.