Grokking the Coding Interview: Patterns for Coding Questions
Fast track your coding interview prep by learning coding patterns. Act smartly, and follow the coding patterns.

Course Overview
Coding interviews are becoming increasingly challenging. A few years back, brushing up on key data structures and going through 50 to 75 coding interview questions was more than enough prep for an interview. Today, everyone has access to massive sets of coding problems, and they have become more difficult to account for. The process has gotten more competitive. When our team sat together to brainstorm ideas to make the interview process easier for candidates, we quickly realized that one skill helped us the most when preparing for coding interviews: "the ability to map a new problem to an already known problem." To help candidates with this, we have compiled a list of 32 common coding patterns to help solve coding questions. The idea is that once you are familiar with a pattern, you'll be able to solve dozens of problems with it. The techniques taught in this course have helped developers land jobs at top companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, Oracle, OpenAI, and Microsoft.
Course Content
Introduction
Warmup
Pattern: Two Pointers
Pattern: Fast & Slow Pointers
Pattern: Sliding Window
Pattern: Merge Intervals
Pattern: Cyclic Sort
Pattern: In-place Reversal of a Linked List
Pattern: Stacks
Pattern: Monotonic Stack
Pattern: Hash Maps
Level Order Traversal Pattern
NewPattern: Tree Breadth First Search
Pattern: Tree Depth First Search
Pattern: Graphs
Pattern: Island (Matrix Traversal)
Pattern: Two Heaps
Pattern: Subsets
Pattern: Modified Binary Search
Pattern: Bitwise XOR
Pattern: Top 'K' Elements
Pattern: K-way Merge
Pattern: Greedy Algorithms
Pattern: 0/1 Knapsack (Dynamic Programming)
Fibonacci Numbers (Dynamic Programming)
NewPalindromic Subsequence (Dynamic Programming)
NewPattern: Backtracking
Pattern: Trie
Pattern: Topological Sort (Graph)
Pattern: Union Find
NewPattern: Ordered Set
NewPattern: Prefix Sum
NewPattern: Multi-threaded
Counting Pattern (easy)
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Monotonic Queue Pattern (easy)
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Simulation Pattern (easy)
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Linear Sorting Algorithm Pattern (easy)
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Meet in the Middle Pattern (medium)
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MO’s Algorithm Pattern (medium)
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Serialize and Deserialize Pattern (medium)
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Clone Pattern (medium)
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Articulation Points and Bridges Pattern (hard)
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Segment Tree Pattern (hard)
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Binary Indexed Tree Pattern (hard)
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Miscellaneous
Revision
Test Your Knowledge (Easy)
Test Your Knowledge (Medium)
Test Your Knowledge (Hard)
Conclusions
What people say about our courses




About the Author

Arslan Ahmad
Industry Expertise & Leadership
Arslan Ahmad is the lead author of Grokking the Coding Interview: Patterns for Coding Questions. As the founder of Design Gurus and a former FAANG hiring manager, he has worked at industry giants like Facebook (now Meta) and Microsoft.
He has conducted hundreds of system design interviews, giving him unique insight into what top tech companies look for in candidates.
The course also incorporates expertise from senior engineers at Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Uber, ensuring you learn system design best practices from professionals who have built and scaled real-world systems.
500+
Interviews Conducted
10k+
Students Taught
FAQs
What is Grokking the Coding Interview and who is it for?
Grokking the Coding Interview: Patterns for Coding Questions is an online course that teaches you how to solve coding interview problems using reusable patterns, instead of memorizing hundreds of individual questions. It's the original coding patterns course and it's rated 4.6 out of 5 by more than 62,000 learners. Whether you're a new grad facing your first coding round or a senior engineer brushing up before interviews, it gives you a clear, structured way to prepare so you can walk in confident.
What are coding patterns, and why does Grokking teach them?
Coding patterns are reusable problem-solving templates like Two Pointers, Sliding Window, Merge Intervals, and Topological Sort, and each one unlocks a whole family of interview questions. Instead of grinding through hundreds of unrelated problems, Grokking the Coding Interview organizes its 245 problems around these patterns, so you learn the underlying approach once and start recognizing it everywhere. Once you can see the pattern behind a question, even unfamiliar problems feel approachable.
Who created Grokking the Coding Interview, and what are their credentials?
Grokking the Coding Interview was created by the team at Design Gurus, led by Arslan Ahmad, an ex-FAANG engineer and former hiring manager at Meta and Microsoft. Having sat on both sides of the interview table, he built the course around what interviewers actually look for. The pattern-based approach it introduced has since been used by hundreds of thousands of engineers preparing for coding interviews.
Is Grokking the Coding Interview suitable for beginners?
Yes, it's beginner-friendly and needs no prior experience. The course introduces each pattern from the ground up and builds toward harder problems gradually, so even if you're new to coding interviews you can follow along comfortably.
How is Grokking the Coding Interview different from LeetCode?
LeetCode is a huge bank of problems you practice on your own, while Grokking the Coding Interview is a structured course that teaches you the patterns behind those problems. Rather than solving questions at random and hoping something sticks, you learn a focused set of coding patterns backed by 245 hand-picked problems. The result is that you start seeing the strategy behind a question instead of memorizing one-off solutions.
How many problems does Grokking the Coding Interview include, and how is it structured?
Grokking the Coding Interview includes 245 hand-picked coding problems, organized into pattern-based chapters that move from easy to hard. Each chapter centers on a single pattern and works through the problems that reinforce it, so you build real depth in one pattern before moving on to the next. By the end you've covered a wide range of patterns with plenty of practice in each.
Does Grokking the Coding Interview provide a certificate of completion?
Yes, Design Gurus gives you a certificate of completion once you finish all the modules, and you can add it to your LinkedIn profile or share it with employers.
Is Grokking the Coding Interview free?
You can start Grokking the Coding Interview for free on DesignGurus.io. The free tier lets you explore the introductory lessons and get a feel for how the course is structured before you commit. For full access to all 245 problems and their solutions, you can either buy lifetime access to this course or take an annual subscription that unlocks every Design Gurus course, and discounted regional pricing is available.
Which programming languages does Grokking the Coding Interview support?
Grokking the Coding Interview gives you solutions in Python, Java, C++, JavaScript, Go, and C#, so you can learn and practice in whatever language you'll actually use in your interview.
Is Grokking the Coding Interview the same on Educative and Design Gurus?
No, they're two different courses today. The official, continuously updated Grokking the Coding Interview lives only on DesignGurus.io, built and maintained by the original creators. An earlier text-only version was once hosted on the third-party platform Educative, but that edition is no longer maintained by the original authors, so for the authentic, up-to-date course, DesignGurus.io is the only place to find it.
Will Grokking the Coding Interview help me prepare for FAANG coding interviews?
Grokking the Coding Interview is built to prepare you for the coding round used at FAANG and other top tech companies, because it teaches the patterns behind the questions those interviews rely on. You'll practice exactly what interviewers evaluate: spotting the right pattern, writing a correct solution, and reasoning about time and space complexity. That mix is what helps you stay calm and structured when a tough problem shows up.
