Brute-Forcing My Algorithmic Ignorance with an LLM in 7 Days

Summary

My Google Recruitment Journey (Part 1): Brute-Forcing My Algorithmic Ignorance Introduction About 2 months ago, an email from xwf.google.com dropped into my inbox, referencing an application from a year prior that I even forgot about. My initial classification was that it is not possible and that this is just spam. But after the screening call, the reality hit: I will have two online interviews (one technical, one behavioral) in just a week. And not just a regular interview to another company, these will be interviews for a company that I still consider as one of the top-of-the-world factory of engineers. This was a critical state. I’ve worked as a software developer in telecommunications for a few years, focusing on high-level abstraction: routing, message processing, and writing business logic. In my hobbyist gamedev projects, even though sometimes I liked to make some pathfinding algorithm or to do a CPU 3D rasterizer by hand, at the end of the day my metric for success was simple: if it runs at >60 FPS without drops, it ships. My data structures were pragmatic: flat vectors, statically sized arrays, sometimes simple maps, and for hard problems "SQLite". And all of my attempt at writing fancy algorithms or data structure was a cool learning journey, that unfortunately did not have a direct impact on my job skills, and there were always better ways to spend this time if I wanted to optimize for a telecommunications career as well as for a gamedev career. Classical algorithms and strict LeetCode-style data structures were always outside my area of interest. My earliest attempts at learning them had failed completely. Even in my earliest memories on all primary school programming contests, I always failed at them. I had one week, a day job, other regular obligations and a fundamental knowledge gap. Day 0: Making the plan and procrastination dressed as learning. After some initial thinking (I mean procrastination on YouTube and online forums for at least a few hours ...