Interview Prep · Home
Learn it once, say it out loud, land the round.
Interactive study pages built from your 36-file curriculum. Every concept taught from scratch, anchored to systems you already run in production — Kong, Kafka, Kubernetes, Postgres, Sentinel.
Ready now — start here
📈 Complexity Analysis
Big-O from first principles: the seven curves, reading cost off code, amortized analysis, the constraints decoder ring — plus a live work calculator.
DSA · file 01 read first
🗂 Arrays, Strings & Hashing
Where the hashmap earns its O(1): contiguous memory, collisions & load factor, two pointers, sliding window, prefix sums — the highest-frequency interview topics.
DSA · file 02
🧭 Patterns Cheatsheet
The "see X → think Y" recognition table across every DSA topic, a 90-second triage script, and your prioritized 20-problem list.
DSA · file 10 pre-interview skim
🗄 Databases
B-tree indexes, joins, ACID & isolation levels, Postgres MVCC, N+1, connection pooling — the #1 fundamentals topic for backend roles.
CS Fundamentals · file 04
🌳 Trees & BSTs
Traversals with a step-through animator, BST validation via bounds, LCA, serialize/deserialize, and why databases chose B-trees.
DSA · file 04 stepper inside
🕸 Graphs
BFS vs DFS driven by hand — same graph, different frontier. Topo sort, islands, Dijkstra intuition, union-find, and "secretly a graph" recognition.
DSA · file 05 stepper inside
📐 System Design: How to Approach
The 6-phase framework, the first-5-minutes script, and a live back-of-envelope calculator that shows its arithmetic.
System Design · file 01
🤖 Agents, Tools & MCP
The agent loop, MCP architecture, the five Anthropic patterns — and a stepper that walks your own Sentinel pipeline, reject-branch included.
AI Systems · file 03 your moat
The 2-day battle plan (condensed)
| Block | Focus | Pages / files |
|---|---|---|
| Day 1 AM | DSA patterns, not problems | Complexity → Arrays & Hashing → Patterns · 4 timed problems |
| Day 1 PM | Trees, graphs, DP recognition | md files 04, 05, 07 · 2 timed problems |
| Day 1 eve | CS fundamentals sweep | Databases → networking → concurrency (md files) |
| Day 2 AM | System design framework | md files 03/01–02 · 2 paper designs |
| Day 2 PM | Your stories + AI systems | md 03/06, 05/03+05, story bank — out loud |
| Day 2 eve | Videos + 2 final problems | resources shortlist · Python cheatsheet before bed |
The three rules that move the needle: ① Think out loud — narrated reasoning passes rounds, silent perfection doesn't. ② When stuck, price the brute force and name the bottleneck. ③ Steer every open question to Sentinel or the 2M req/month gateway — you have production stories most 2-year engineers don't.
Full curriculum lives in output/interview-prep/ (36 files). More pages ship as you ask for them.