Tips for Live Coding and System Design

Practical challenges and Live Coding are common in interviews for Senior level positions. Here are the best strategies based on real interview sessions:

1. Aligning Expectations

Before writing any line of code, ask the rules of the game:

• “Can I search on Google?”
• “Is the use of AI/Copilot allowed?”
• Clarify the requirements of the challenge. If it’s a React component (e.g., pagination), confirm what input data you will receive and what the expected initial state is.

2. Think Out Loud

The evaluator is not just testing if your code works; they want to understand how you think.

• Explain what you are doing at each step.
• If you get stuck, explain what your mental block is and what approaches you are considering to solve it. The evaluator will often give you a hint.

3. Divide and Conquer (Iteration)

Don’t try to write the final optimized solution right away.

• Step 1: Get the basic functionality working (e.g., render the raw data list).
• Step 2: Add complex business rules (e.g., slice the list based on page size).
• Step 3: Work on UX and Edge Cases (e.g., disable the ‘Previous’ button if on the first page, highlight the current page).

4. Optimization and Scalability

If there is time left (or if they ask how you would improve it), talk about points beyond the initial scope:

• “Here we could extract this logic into a Custom Hook to reuse it in the project.”
• “If the list were too long, we could adopt API pagination instead of processing everything on the client-side.”

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