Dynamic Programming for Coding Interviews

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 10:00:00 +0500

Dynamic programming is the topic candidates fear most, and the one interviewers at Google, Meta, and Amazon keep asking anyway. This hub collects everything on this site about DP interview prep: what the technique actually is, the patterns that cover the vast majority of interview questions, and the ten days of our 60-day challenge that take you from memoized Fibonacci to palindrome partitioning.

What Dynamic Programming Actually Is

Strip away the intimidating name and dynamic programming is one idea: solve each subproblem once, store the answer, and reuse it. A naive recursive Fibonacci recomputes fib(3) thousands of times for fib(40). DP computes it once. That single change turns an exponential O(2^n) algorithm into a linear O(n) one.

10 Dynamic Programming Patterns Every FAANG Candidate Must Know

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0500

Ask a room of candidates which topic they’d remove from FAANG interviews if they could, and dynamic programming wins by a landslide. It feels like an endless sea of unrelated puzzles (climbing stairs one day, burst balloons the next) with no visible connection between them.

Here’s the secret that experienced candidates eventually discover: there is no sea. There are about ten ponds. Nearly every DP question asked at Google, Meta, Amazon, and friends is a variation on a small set of recurring patterns. Learn the patterns and you stop solving individual problems; you start recognizing which pond you’re standing in and applying the recurrence you already know.

Dynamic-Programming on Algorithms in 60 Days

Dynamic Programming for Coding Interviews

What Dynamic Programming Actually Is

10 Dynamic Programming Patterns Every FAANG Candidate Must Know