Establish your starting point
Choose a small set of problems covering the topics relevant to the interview. Record whether you understood the requirement, found a correct approach, implemented it and explained its cost. These are separate skills. A bug in an otherwise sound approach calls for different practice from misunderstanding the problem.
Use the employer’s official material, such as Amazon’s software interview topics, to narrow the scope. Language documentation, such as the Python tutorial, is useful for resolving syntax and behavior questions. Do not use unofficial recollections as a guarantee of the current interview.
Use a four-session cycle
| Session | Main task | Artifact to keep |
|---|---|---|
| Understand | Solve one representative problem without time pressure | Assumptions and approach |
| Explain | Walk another person through the solution | Unclear parts and questions |
| Verify | Test boundaries and compare alternatives | Tests and complexity reasoning |
| Revisit | Reimplement a previous weak solution | What changed in your understanding |
This is an original adaptable plan, not a measured placement program. The time allocated should fit your baseline and available schedule.
Test the behavior you actually promised
For a function that removes duplicates while preserving order, test an empty input, repeated values and an invalid input. Check that the original input is not modified if that is part of the contract. State whether equality applies to primitives or object identity.
The downloadable exercise and test file provide a small worked example. Save both files in one directory and run node --test stable-unique.test.mjs. This is our teaching exercise, not a leaked interview question.
Keep an error log that changes the next session
Classify a mistake as a requirement gap, algorithm gap, implementation bug, missing test or unclear explanation. Write one concrete adjustment. “Practice more” is too vague; “check the empty input before choosing the data structure” can change behavior.
As the interview approaches, rehearse the actual environment and permitted tools. Follow the employer’s policy on assistance. Continue with the interview process guide and system-design preparation if those stages are part of your process.