Practicing for programming interviews is easier if we have a system in place that can:
- Step through and debug problems quickly
- Add test cases easily
- Run tests automatically
- Have built-in modules for the common Binary Tree and List Node problems
- Be able to revisit old problems and run them again!
This template uses uv to set up a virtual environment and run pytest.
Python is the lingua franca of programming interviews, so this template uses that! Generally you don't want to use any external libraries in interviews, so those are not included here. If you do want/need an external library, you can add it to pyrpoject.toml or use uv add.
When solving problems, it helps to add a thought process at the start! Even a simple comment block helps when revisiting the problem in a few weeks or few years.
I prefer to name the problems with the number and the difficulty level so they are easy to sort and find, e.g. 0001_E_two_sum.py. Shockingly there are over 3,000 leetcode problems at the time of this writing, so I use 4 digits and 0-pad the file name.
For Trees, the example problem here should show how we can copy in the test cases straight from leetcode.com and have a correct structure. Printing the tree can help with visual debugging.
To execute the tests, run uv run pytest in the root directory.
❯ uv run pytest
=================== test session starts ===================
platform linux -- Python 3.11.11, pytest-8.3.4, pluggy-1.5.0
rootdir: /home/andy/dev/leetcode_template
configfile: pyproject.toml
collected 7 items
0002_M_add_two_numbers.py ... [ 42%]
0098_M_validate_binary_search_tree.py .. [ 71%]
1257_M_smallest_region.py .. [100%]
==================== 7 passed in 0.01s ====================