Misc

You used an AI tool today. For example, ChatGPT may have drafted an email, or Claude helped debug a function. Perhaps you looked up something you would not have asked a colleague out loud. These tools sit in almost every workflow now — and yet, most people using them cannot explain what happens after they hit send. Tokens. Context windows. Hallucinations. Knowledge cutoffs. Agents. The terms show up in standups, headlines, and LinkedIn threads. People repeat them, but few can define them. That gap matters, because the better you understand …

Last month I interviewed someone for a senior data-engineer role: a standard sliding-window style problem, nothing exotic. They echoed the prompt, then started typing in a handful of seconds. Under three minutes later they had an optimal, polished solution—honestly better than I would have typed cold. So I asked one follow-up: Why a hash map here instead of a set? About ten seconds of silence. That is when I knew. After hundreds of interviews, on both sides of the table—the shift underway in hiring is the largest I have seen. …

Something strange keeps happening in software engineering discourse: every week another headline claims coding is dead. Comments under almost every technical video ask the same question—should I still learn to code in 2026? Some engineering skills cannot be replaced with AI. Here is a clearer picture: AI replaces tasks, not engineers. Models can draft, debug, and refactor quickly. They do not sit in roadmap meetings, carry on-call context, or grow a junior through a stuck afternoon. People said arithmetic was doomed when calculators spread; then encyclopedias when Wikipedia arrived; then …

Why writing a resume for the recruiter alone is no longer enough — and what to do about it. When you hit submit in 2026, your resume does not go straight to a person. It takes a trip: first an automated filter, then an AI-assisted scoring pass, and only then a human hiring manager. Two of those three readers are AI-driven. Most people still optimize only for the third — which is a big reason they never get a call. In 2022, the resume mainly served a keyword-matching ATS and …

Solving a programming exercise is one thing; becoming the engineer everyone turns to is another. Somewhere between “junior” and “subject matter expert” there is a path—but when you start out, nobody hands you a map. This article lays out eight free GitHub repositories, in order, that together cover your developer roadmap: from choosing what to learn, to interviewing, to understanding systems deeply and building something of your own. Phase 1 — Finding Your Path Every developer starts curious and a little overwhelmed. You need clarity before anything else: what to …

Anthropic—the company that builds Claude—sends every engineering candidate an email before their interview: “Note that use of AI tools during this interview is not permitted.” Meanwhile, Meta hands you Claude, GPT-5, and Gemini inside the interview and says “go ahead, use them all.” Both companies still test you on algorithms and data structures. Google puts “experience with data structures and algorithms” in every job posting, from intern to senior staff. OpenAI does the same. So if the companies building AI still want you to know algorithms, what does that tell …

Smart Interview Grind offers a personalized study plan for interview preparation, addressing common issues found in generic approaches like LeetCode Premium. By tailoring plans to individual timelines, skills, and target companies, it provides week-by-week problem schedules and company-specific insights. Users receive lifetime access, ensuring optimal preparation regardless of changing circumstances.

Ever wondered where those zeros and ones that computers supposedly work with are actually located? While you’re writing code in high-level programming languages, the system quietly manipulates these binary digits behind the scenes. Understanding bit manipulation can make your programs very, very fast – and that’s exactly why tech companies love engineers who master these concepts. What Are Bits and Why Should You Care? A bit is the smallest form of memory that can be occupied in a computer. Simply put, it’s either set (1) or not set (0) – …

Let us try to understand this problem statement first. We are in charge of a fancy circus and 2 kangaroos have to jump on a number line. The interesting part is that both the kangaroos have a different start position, and different jump distances. It is a little tricky to understand, the problems asks to calculate the number line jumps such that both the kangaroos are at the same position. We will try to simplify this using some diagrams, and see how the kangaroos actually jump. In the given test …

Question: Given an integer N, find all the prime factors of the number. Input: N = 45 Output: 3 5 Finding prime factors of any numbers is a very important concept in number theory. One sample problem is available here in which we have to find the largest prime factor. The mathematical concept behind this problem is simple. We start with ‘2’ and keep dividing the original number to get rid of composite factors. Continue this process until the number is no longer divisible by 2. This means that at …