Programming Fundamentals and Code Quality Questions

Encompasses core programming skills, data structures, basic algorithms, language fundamentals, and code quality practices. Expect proficiency with arrays, strings, lists, hash maps or dictionaries, sets, common collection operations, basic sorting and searching algorithms, and tradeoffs between data structures. Understand control flow, functions and modular design, classes and object oriented programming concepts including encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism, exception handling, file input and output, and common language idioms for mainstream interview languages such as Python, Java, and C plus plus. Emphasizes writing clean, readable, maintainable code: meaningful naming, modular functions, small interfaces, handling edge cases and errors, logging and documentation, simple testing and debugging strategies, and awareness of time and space complexity for common operations. Candidates should be able to implement correct solutions, follow language specific idioms where appropriate, and demonstrate attention to code quality and readability.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Explain time and space complexity of Python dict operations (get, set, delete, iteration). Discuss how resizing and hash collisions affect performance, and explain how CPython maintains insertion order for dicts and the implications for SRE tools that rely on deterministic iteration order.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Implement a lock-free stack (Treiber stack) using atomic compare-and-swap in Java or C++. Provide push and pop code, explain the ABA problem, and describe two mitigation strategies (e.g., tagged pointers and hazard pointers). Discuss performance characteristics under contention.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Design an idempotent API client pattern for HTTP requests where retries may cause replays. Describe client-side idempotency keys, header format, deduplication storage on the server, expiry of dedup records, and provide a Python code sketch showing how the client generates and stores idempotency keys safely between retries.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Design an algorithm to compute the top-k most frequent event types from a high-volume stream that cannot fit in memory. Provide pseudocode for at least two approaches (e.g., Misra-Gries and Count-Min Sketch), explain error bounds, memory usage, and how to merge partial summaries from multiple workers.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Explain the differences between stack and heap memory allocation, variable lifetime, and common pitfalls in C/C++ versus managed languages like Java or Python. Relate these concepts to SRE issues such as segmentation faults, memory leaks, and garbage collection pauses.

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