8 Must Use Resources For Crushing Your Coding Interviews

A common question I receive from developers is, “How do I prepare for coding interviews?” If you don’t know what questions to expect, it’s hard to determine what you should be studying and what not to focus on. Interviewing can be a stressful process where you’re filled with anxiety, fear of not having all the answers, and it all quickly becomes overwhelming.

There’s a lot on the line when you’re interviewing, especially at your dream job. Right now, you may be broke, earning minimum wage, or living paycheck to paycheck. You may be working at a job that you hate, but you clock in everyday, so that you can provide for your family. Or, you may feel like you’re not living up to your potential.

Passing an interview and landing your dream job can be life changing.  Imagine getting paid a highly competitive salary and receiving benefits like health care and a 401K. You now have a successful career in front of you. You can begin living the lifestyle you desire. You can finally take your family out on vacations. And, your parents are proud of you!

Here’s the thing, coding interviews don’t have to be a scary, frustrating experience where you end up feeling like a failure.

Say goodbye to interviewing stress because these resources reveal what you should study and what types of questions to expect. By utilizing these different tools, you’ll be able to deepen your programming knowledge while thinking more critically when tackling new programming problems. Whether you're months, weeks, or days away from your coding interviews, these resources will help you feel confident, relaxed, and unstoppable. Let’s dive right in!

Disclaimer: This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for more details.

freeCodeCamp offers 3 algorithm challenge sets ranging from beginner to advanced with each set taking 50 hours to complete for a total of 47 challenges. For each JavaScript exercise, the objective is to fix the failing tests, so that all tests pass. Once they do, you're able to move onto the next challenge. By the end of each set, you will have developed more of a programmer's mindset. If you ever get stuck on a problem, you can request a hint or ask for help on their forum. You can access these challenges for free on freeCodeCamp platform.

The HackerRank team is on a mission to match every developer in the world to the right job by providing a technical recruiting platform that assesses developers based on actual coding skills. They support over 20 programming languages and have a wide range of questions for bit manipulation, sorting, string processing, dynamic programming and a selection of math-based problems. Whether you're looking to sharpen your coding skills, compete in programming contests, or find a job, you definitely want to check out HackerRank!

CodeWars is an excellent coding practice platform with a ton of excellent "kata", which are small coding challenges. Each morning, spend 10-20 minutes solving katas to rapidly increase your programming fluency. When you complete a challenge, you can compare your answer with others to further your understanding. Within the CodeWars community, you can discuss each kata, learn best practices, and discover other innovative techniques.

The platform currently supports 20 languages with 12 more in beta, allowing you to master your current programming language of choice, or expand your knowledge of a new one.

Interview Cake is a novel step-by-step interview problem walkthrough tool that simulates realistic coding interviews, giving you hints and challenging your answers along the way.  What's great about their platform is that they don't just give you the answer. They actually teach you how to derive the solution yourself. Every question includes a full breakdown, gotcha list, and "what we learned" section guiding you through the right way of determining the answer. 

Interview Cake provides 50+ hours of practice questions and readings, covering all the core data structures like linked lists, queues, stacks, hash maps, graphs, trees, and more! They even cover system design and dynamic programming challenges. Below is a sample problem. 

Students who have used Interview Cake have landed jobs at top software companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and more!

You can purchase a 1-year subscription with Interview Cake or join their free weekly question email list. They have also have an amazing risk-free guarantee when purchasing a subscription. If you ever want your money back for any reason, like you didn't get the developer job you wanted, you never used the material, or you didn't think it was worth it, you can simply email their CEO to get a full refund. Even with a refund, you'll still be able to access their free tier!

LeetCode is a platform to help you enhance your programming skills, expand your expertise, and prepare for coding interviews. Their platform supports 14 popular coding languages and offers over 750 questions for you to practice. Challenge topics include object-oriented design, operating systems, algorithms, databases, shell, system design. LeetCode also supports select mock interview questions by companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, & LinkedIn. You can access their set of free exercises or signup for a monthly or annual LeetCode subscription.

Ace your coding interviews by mastering data structures and algorithms using the course, The Coding Interview Bootcamp, by Stephen Grider. With over 9,100 students enrolled and a course rating of 4.8 out of 5, this course will enable you to master commonly asked interview questions. The instructor uses JavaScript as he teaches you how to solve challenging algorithms and walks you through common data structures used in web development. Throughout the course, you will have practiced dozens of different challenges. Here's a preview of the course curriculum.

In this course, you'll get:

• Clear, well-diagramed explanations for every single problem to make sure you understand the solution.
• An overview of the most important data structures to know about. These are presented for people without a CS degree.
• A huge collection of common algorithm questions, including everything from 'reversing a string' to 'determine the width of a BST'.
• Sensible strategies for tackling systems design problems.
• Insider tips on answering what interviewers are really looking for.
• Constant support on the Udemy Q&A forums with Stephen Grider!

By the end of the the Coding Interview Bootcamp, you'll be able to crush your coding interviews!

Geeks For Geeks is a computer science portal with an excellent collection of programming, algorithm, design patterns, and interview questions.  They provide well written and well explained interview preparation material for dozens of top companies as well as top interview questions for common data structures and algorithms.

What I like about Geeks For Geeks is that they group their programming problems by company and topic. Also, they offer hundreds of interview experiences categorized by company, so that you know what it's like to interview at your dream company. Here's a preview of their most visited posts, trending content, and popular categories.

Programming Praxis publishes new programming exercises weekly for developers to maintain and sharpen their coding skills. This blog takes a different approach than the other resources described in which when you solve a problem, you do it for self-growth and self-gratification. You don't earn points or rank on a leader board. You don't even see a record of who completed which problems. The only dopamine hit you'll get is from the satisfaction of solving the puzzle. 

The problems on Programming Praxis may take you minutes to an hour to solve based on your experience. The problems are designed to be language-agnostic, so everyone can participate using their preferred language. Also, each exercise comes with a sample solution, but the author emphasizes that their is no one right answer or perfect solution.

You’ve read about the different resources out there to crush your coding interviews.

Now it’s time to choose one.

The first step?

Leave a comment to let me know which one you're going to check out first.

Are you currently using one of the resources on this list? If so, which one?

Which resource would you recommend to other developers?

Either way, leave a quick comment below right now.

Related Content:

Curious about what web dev books to study? Check out 40 Best Books For Web Developers.

Curious about what web dev courses to take? Check out the Best Courses For Web Developers.