Microsoft Corporation Senior Software Engineer Interview Questions and Answers

A palindrome is a word, phrase, or sequence that reads the same backward as forward, like 'racecar' or 'level'.

• Check if the string is the same when reversed. Example: 'madam' == 'madam'.

• Ignore spaces, punctuation, and capitalization. Example: 'A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!' is a palindrome.

• Use two-pointer technique: one pointer starts at the beginning and the other at the end of the string.

Count the number of islands in a 2D grid of '1's (land) and '0's (water).

• Use Depth-First Search (DFS) or Breadth-First Search (BFS) to explore each island.

• Iterate through each cell in the grid; if a '1' is found, increment the island count.

• Mark visited land cells by changing '1's to '0's to avoid counting them again.

• Example: In a grid [[1,1,0],[0,0,1],[1,0,1]], there are 4 islands.

LLD for a distributed cache service involves designing the architecture, data flow, and communication protocols.

• Design a scalable architecture with multiple nodes for storing and retrieving data.

• Implement data partitioning to distribute data across nodes efficiently.

• Define communication protocols for nodes to coordinate and synchronize data.

• Include mechanisms for data replication and consistency across nodes.

• Consi...read more

Print the content of a spiral matrix

• Create a 2D array to represent the matrix

• Use four variables to keep track of boundaries (top, bottom, left, right)

• Iterate through the matrix in a spiral pattern, printing each element as you go

To find a free IP range in an infinite pool of reserve IPs, we can iterate through the pool and check for available ranges.

• Iterate through the pool of reserve IPs

• Check for consecutive available IPs to form a range

• Return the first free IP range found

Search for an element in a rotated sorted array

• Use binary search to find the pivot point where the array is rotated

• Determine which half of the array to search based on the target value and the pivot point

• Continue binary search in the selected half to find the target element

Connect nodes at the same level of a binary tree horizontally.

• Use a queue to traverse the tree level by level.

• For each level, connect the nodes in the queue from left to right.

• Set the right pointer of each node to the next node in the queue.

• Set the right pointer of the last node in the level to null.