Project Planning Designing An Indexing Project: Fill & Download for Free

Before I joined Google as an intern, I was a Master’s student and had around 8 years of programming experience. Since I mainly worked at startups and on personal / school projects, my engineering priorities were:Getting things done quickly and correctly (startups move fast, school projects are due soon)Making sure my code is concise, by using advanced language features and relying heavily on STL.Now, code standards at Google are HIGH. My impression has been that out of all the large tech companies, Google has one of the highest bars for software quality. Also, the team that I was on was one of many teams powering Search Indexing - meaning some code I wrote ran for each of the billions of web pages indexed per day. So at that scale, different priorities matter.At Google, work needs to be understandable and future-proofed. In particular, I became much better at:Writing code which is easy to understand. This actually requires a surprising level of empathy! Rather than writing code that makes you satisfied as an experienced engineer, try to write code a new engineer could understand. Also, code needs to be easy to review. Your coworkers should be able to glance at the project and instantly understand what it does and how, or what bugs it might have. Most projects can always be simplified further, except for maybe the fast inverse square root algorithm.Planning projects in design documents. Design docs at Google are docs which outline the problem, solution, architecture, and units of work. This allows other engineers to gain visibility on your code, and also point out pitfalls for your project before it’s too late. It also is a nice project management technique for tracking progress to milestones, and estimating time for your project.Testing. School and startups never stress this much, beyond the simple “write one or two unit tests”. However I now view testing as a test of how creative you are as an engineer. What’s the most creative way you can break your own code? I became much better at mocking, stubbing, faking, and all that jazz. Since my team worked on projects which use many other teams’ work as dependencies, mocking was crucial to ensure that our logic is tested independently of other libraries.Working for Google definitely raised the bar for my code quality, but more importantly my soft skills as an engineer! I’d recommend anyone seriously interested in engineering to work at Google (or a similar company) for a few years.

I have given quite a lot of interviews during last year, mostly for the software engineering intern position. I'll try to break down questions asked in two basic sections, algorithmic problems and puzzles.However, most programming interviews rarely consist of puzzles. Almost all the interviews I have given were for "Tier-1" companies and I was not asked a puzzle in any single one of them. Most interviewers will ask you algorithmic problems and sometimes few design problems.PuzzlesYou play a game where you are allowed 3 dice rolls. If at any step you decided to end the game, you get the number of coins equal to the value on the last dice roll. What is the maximum expected number of coins you can get?Dropping an egg from a floor number greater then [math]N[/math] of a 100 floor building will break it. You have to find [math]N[/math], while minimizing the number of drops for the worst case., if you have 2 eggs with you.How many points are there on the globe where by walking one mile south, one mile east and one mile north you reach the place where you started?Given a set of digits, find sum of all [math]N[/math] digit numbers whose each digit belong to given set of digits.Algorithmic ProblemsFind if a number is present in a sorted array that has been circularly rotated.Given a sequence, find if its pre-order traversal of a valid Binary Search Tree.Given a [math]N*M[/math] matrix of numbers from [math]1[/math] to [math]N*M[/math](each number occurs only once), find lexico-graphically smallest path from top left to right bottom while moving right or down only.Given a float [math]N[/math], find [math]\sqrt{N}[/math].Given set of denominations, find the minimum number of coins required to form a sum. A coin of any denomination can be used multiple types.Given set of denominations, find the minimum number of distinct denominations required to form a sum. A coin of any denomination can be used multiple types.Given [math]N[/math] balloons, if you burst [math]i^{th}[/math] balloon you get [math]A_{i-1}*A_i*A_{i+1}[/math] coins and then [math]i^{th}[/math] and [math](i+1)^{th}[/math] balloons become adjacent. Find maximum number of coins you can gather.Given a string [math]S[/math] and a set of characters, find smallest window in [math]S[/math] that contains given set of characters.Given an unsorted array where each element is at distance at most [math]K[/math] from its correct position(i.e. position in sorted array), sort the array.Given a binary tree, check if its a Binary Search Tree.Find number of black connected components in a black and white matrix. Another version is if matrix is 3 dimensional.Sort an array stored on a tape, where there exists at pointer that points to an element at an index and operations allowed on the pointer are read, write, advance, goto beginning. You have 5 empty tapes each of size 100 which you can use.Given [math]N[/math] sorted arrays, find the [math]K^{th}[/math] smallest element if all arrays are merged.You have 4 strings, you can rearrange them in any way you want. You have to maximize the longest common prefix of all 4 strings after the rearrangement.There are [math]N[/math] points in 2-D plane. Each point has a color R, B, G. Find a triangle of largest area with these points such that one of the sides of triangle is parallel to either axis and each vertex has a different color point.Find triplets in a given array which sum to zero.A string like a2b3c5 un-compresses to aabbbccccc. Compress a given string.Clone a linked list.Clone a graph given in adjacency list form.Reverse a linked list.Given a python program determine the line at which a compilation error due to indentation occurs.Given a dictionary and various queries of strings, for each query return the strings present in dictionary anagramic to the query string.Find median of a running stream of integers each time a new number is added to the stream.Even though I could have solved each one of them, I sucked at some of them in my interviews and couldn't make it through any overseas company. Of all the Indian companies I had applied to, I cleared through all of theirs interview processes, though.I suppose your motive behind asking this question might be preparing for technical interviews and even though I have answered the question, I don't mind giving you some unsolicited advice. You current approach must be something like visiting websites like glassdoor, geeksforgeeks etc. and solving through problems and puzzles or probably going randomly through blogs scattered over the whole internet. There is very little structure to the content you are preparing for in this way.Considering the scenario, one of my seniors has started InterviewBit.com. All the content is well structured; you'll feel like you have a personal coach. There are various features which you can hear from the co-founder himself. Anshuman Singh's answer to How can I get a job at Facebook or Google in 6 months? I need a concise work-plan to build a good enough skill set. Should I join some other start-up or build my own projects/start-up? Should I just focus on practicing data structures and algorithms?

Plan on many years of continual learning and refining your knowledge and skills - yes, years or possibly a lifetime as most commit. I would define “full stack” as able to write a program with a user interface that also interacts with a backing service or database. Technically you could create a command line interface, and use an in-memory “database” (i.e. an array), and qualify. Most likely, however, you are referring to a modern browser-based web application that presents dynamic content to a user from a database and accepts and stores user input, or logs user activity.You will need ultimately need to learn requirements gathering, documentation, user interface design, graphic design, database design, database indexing and querying/optimization, application interface design, systems administration, server configuration and management, web server installation and configuration, application server installation and configuration, internet architecture (http, tcp), networking (basic), dns (basic), software deployment, version control, and of course know python programming, html, CSS, templating, and JavaScript.You will probably need other soft skills like marketing (to attract customers, users, or team members), contract negotiation, project planning, project management and reporting, risk mitigation and planning, UX (customer discovery, empathy, …) etc.If you are just learning, you can probably ignore many architectural and non-functional concerns for performance scaling, caching, sticky sessions, tracing, localization, security, maintenance, etc. until you can build apps proficiently. For now you can ignore data structures and algorithms as well. Eventually you will need to know them too.Pick some interesting project or problem to solve - the best way is to choose a problem you want to solve that requires a database-driven web app. A distributed shopping list is a decent starter idea. A distributed contact database, a shared music/media collection, a registration for events, or a 2-way chat with user login and history perhaps.Sketch a sitemap (hierarchical list) of screens the user will interact with - you will need to decide how the user interacts with your program, in order to determine what pieces are needed. Do you require a login? Registration? Lost password? Public vs private pages? Mobile vs desktop vs tablet? Graphics or media?Define a data model - based on the screens you listed, you need to figure out where the data comes from, or where it is saved, and its structure. Login may require a list of users with username and password, for example. The content on the screens is either hard-coded (part of your written code) or it’s dynamic, and you just write placeholders for the content that will come from elsewhere (i.e. database).Define application interfaces - based on your design, you should be able to define your functions like login, logout, register, getListByType, getItemById, saveItem, deleteItem, etc. You should define the fields of data sent to and received from these interfaces. Login may require a username and password and returns true or false perhaps. Register may require a name, email, password and returns an Object with a generated ID (or nothing).Setup your development environment - choose a text editor, a folder to store your project, and plan for the files you will create and consistent naming. Make sure you can execute python code, and know how to install external modules (using pip or similar package manager). Make sure you choose a database (e.g. MySQL or Mongo) and install it or can access it wherever it resides.Choose your tools and libraries - you need to pick a database, and then will know what necessary drivers or modules are needed to talk to it. Learn the API of the library. You will need to serve your program and listen for HTTP requests so install a library like Flask. Learn its API as well. Later you will want to learn how to reverse proxy requests to your app from a front end web server like Apache or Nginx or a load balancer like haproxy, but you can start simple.Build a single “slice” of your app to connect a web page to app server to database - there is little point rushing into building your entire app until you know how to fit it all together. Create a database with test table or collection/index and save a record. Create a simple hello web page that will display some value from your database, then the app that will render the page, then the code that will talk to the database to deliver the data to your app. Get this working first and make sure you see data from the database on the screen. Change the data in the database and confirm it changes when you refresh your screen.Factor your prototype - you want to have a separate file to interact with the database and just expose functions to fetch and store data, and a separate file to handle the web server requests and generate HTML markup read by the browser. Eventually you will want to separate your markup and views and either make API calls to the server, or use a templating engine to “inject” dynamic content into the page placeholders.Build your app - using what you learned and built thus far, finish your database, duplicate the prototype components and write your application. Be sure to add comments in your code to explain how your program works, and have fun.Share your program on Github, and solicit feedback and improve it. Build many more useful apps and do the same. The best way to become a good programmer is to write a lot of programs, and solicit feedback and review others’ code to learn and refine techniques. Keep studying more in each discipline above to improve your skills in front end and back end development and design, data modeling and more. Try new things and as you get better, give back to the open source community by participating in projects.As you can see, it won’t happen overnight, but hopefully this is a decent roadmap for you to get there.