The 7-Day Interview Prep Cheatsheet
Day 7 — Machine coding: LRU, Rate Limiter, Tic-Tac-Toe, Snake & Ladder
The machine-coding and low-level design round, solved live: build an LRU cache, a rate limiter, tic-tac-toe, and snake & ladder from scratch, plus a repeatable way to approach any machine-coding problem under time pressure — with frequently asked follow-ups.
Ninety minutes. A blank editor. An interviewer who says “build me an LRU cache — working code, I’ll throw inputs at it” and then goes quiet. This is the round that scares people most, because there’s nowhere to hide: no multiple choice, no hand-waving about “a database here”, just you and a problem you have to make run. And the cruel part is that most people fail it not because they can’t code, but because they open the editor and start typing before they know what they’re building. Here’s the secret the people who breeze through it already know: a machine-coding round isn’t a memory test. It’…
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