Data structures such as binary trees, linked lists are frequently asked in a technical interview. Sometimes, interviewees are asked to transform one data structure to another. For example, convert a list to a linked list, or covert an ordered list to a binary tree, etc. Today, I’ll talk about a…

Sorting algorithms are frequently asked during a technical interview. Several common sorting algorithms such as quicksort, selection sort, merge sort are usually applied to sorting a list. However, sorting a linked list is not straightforward: it’s not easy to access an element by index in constant running time. Most of…

Introduction — A singly linked list is a set of linked nodes. Different from a singly linked list, each node in a doubly linked list has an extra pointer points to its previous node. Today, I’ll talk about the implementation of a doubly linked list in python. Implementation in Python Node class A doubly linked…

For the given island that’s represented in a matrix of 0's and 1's, we usually use a depth-first search or a breadth-first search algorithm to solve. Today, I’ll introduce how to solve and compare such a problem using both approaches. Problem Given a non-empty 2D array grid of 0's and 1's…

The sliding window algorithm is often used to find the target number in a string/list. Today, I’ll introduce how to solve this leetcode problem using the sliding window algorithm and optimize its running time. Problem description You are given an array of integers nums, there is a sliding window of size k…

We know tree well, a binary search tree performs well in searching. Today, I’ll introduce another tree-like data structure, which is widely used for retrieval of a key in a dataset of strings: trie. Introduction A trie also called prefix-tree, is a type of search tree, a tree data structure used…

My previous post introduced the Knapsack problem. It states how to solve using the dynamic programming algorithm. Besides Knapsack, there’s one series of problems that you might encounter in a coding interview: the house robber problems. Today, let’s talk about it. Problem description You are a professional robber planning to rob houses…

Dynamic programming problems are frequently asked in a tech interview. For me, dynamic programming problems are challenging to understand and to solve. Recently, I see a post demonstrating that dynamic programming problems can be categorized. One of the categories is the Knapsack problem. …

It’s often asked during a technical interview: write a function to get the subsets/combinations/permutations for a given set. These problems seem difficult to solve in the first place, but have similarities when applying the backtracking algorithm. In this post, I’ll illustrate how to solve these problems using the backtracking algorithm. Definitions …