Interview tips, coding patterns, and career advice
Both cost money, so this isn't a free-vs-paid debate — it's a format debate. AlgoExpert is polished, self-paced video; AlgoEngineer is a live cohort with feedback. Here's an honest read on which format actually gets you the offer.
Amit SinghInterview Kickstart is the best-known premium interview-prep program — and priced like it. AlgoEngineer delivers the same core mechanism (live instruction plus mock interviews) for a fraction of the cost. Here's an honest look at what the premium price does and doesn't buy.
Amit SinghNeetCode is free, excellent, and the right answer for a lot of people. So when is a paid live cohort actually worth it over it? An honest side-by-side — including the cases where you should just use NeetCode and keep your money.
Amit SinghMost interview prep is self-study — cheap, excellent for content, and silent on the one thing interviews actually grade. This is an honest look at the live, cohort-based options in 2026, what "live" really buys you, and how to pick without overpaying.
Amit SinghYou type a URL, press Enter, and a page appears in a few hundred milliseconds. Underneath, a chain of protocols hands off in sequence — HSTS, DNS, IP routing, TCP, TLS, and HTTP — then the browser renders. This is the networking foundation every system design builds on, with diagrams, caching, the HTTP/2-vs-3 head-of-line story, and an interactive request waterfall.
Amit SinghAlgoExpert is a solid paid, video-first course — but it is a subscription, the question set is curated (not huge), and it is self-paced. If any of those is your sticking point, here are the honest alternatives.
Amit SinghBinary search is not just "find a value in a sorted array" — the real interview skill is recognizing a monotonic answer space and searching it. Here are the templates, the boundary discipline, and the variations that trip people up.
Amit SinghA rate limiter looks tiny but tests real depth: which algorithm, where it lives, how to keep the count correct across many servers, and how to scale past a single Redis. The full walkthrough — token bucket, the atomic Redis answer, sharding, multi-tier limits, HA, diagrams, and an interactive demo.
Amit SinghThe full 45-minute walkthrough for designing a URL shortener (Bitly/TinyURL) — requirements, scale math, the short-key encoding decision, the read-scaling progression with real numbers, multi-region counter ranges, durability, and the failure modes interviewers probe. With interactive diagrams.
Amit Singh