Aug 3, 2026
Interview advice: enfranchise the trivialities.
Do not neglect them, do not get flustered, do not get irritated, do not get surprised. All world class people are good at this, and all good performance is downstream of this. Applies to leetcode world and coding agent world, doesn't matter.
You write a program, run it, there is a bug. Do not change pace, do not show irritation, do not show surprise or embarrassment. There should be no visible transition whatsoever. A bug isn't "in your way"-- debugging is a first-class citizen like picking a data structure or writing a function. CS 110 should have been "data structures and algorithms and debugging". Or better yet "data structures and debugging and algorithms" so people don't think debugging is somehow special.
Here are some more examples:
- off by one errors
- for loops that have to handle first and last elements differently
- empty or single element arrays passed as arguments
- input with zeros that break division
- open and closed intervals
The difference between how great people and average people treat these things is so stark I can't emphasize it enough. (This isn't about interviews btw but about your attitude to problem solving. Change your attitude and the rest will follow.)