Python Coding Interviews: Tips & Best Practices

You’ve made it past the phone call with the recruiter, and now it’s time to show that you know how to solve problems with actual code. Whether it’s a HackerRank exercise, a take-home assignment, or an onsite whiteboard interview, this is your moment to prove your coding interview skills.

But interviews aren’t just about solving problems: they’re also about showing that you can write clean production code. This means that you have a deep knowledge of Python’s built-in functionality and libraries. This knowledge shows companies that you can move quickly and won’t duplicate functionality that comes with the language just because you don’t know it exists.

At Real Python, we’ve put our heads together and discussed what tools we’re always impressed to see in coding interviews. This course will walk you through the best of that functionality, starting with Python built-ins, then Python’s native support for data structures, and finally Python’s powerful (and often underappreciated) standard library.

In this course, you’ll learn how to:

• Use enumerate() to iterate over both indices and values
• Debug problematic code with breakpoint()
• Format strings effectively with f-strings
• Sort lists with custom arguments
• Use generators instead of list comprehensions to conserve memory
• Define default values when looking up dictionary keys
• Count hashable objects with the collections.Counter class
• Use the standard library to get lists of permutations and combinations