Interview season is coming up again for students and new grads and it is time to get started on interview prep, which includes doing many leetcode problems!

Usually, when we think of technical interview prep for software engineering, we think of leetcode or related websites where we practice using data structures and algorithms to solve problems. By doing many practice problems, we become better at solving these problems. Usually a common issue with students, is that the study method becomes very unorganized when we are simply just trying to do as many problems as we can. This is where Anki comes in.

Anki is a flashcard programs that uses spaced repetition for fast and long-term memorization. This is a program that is often used by medical students during medical school to memorize massive amounts of information in an efficient manner. While software engineering may not contain as much information as medicine, the use case for the program is still very much relevant!

How I go about using the program is creating flashcards for new leetcode problems as I am trying to solve them. It would be a basic front and back flash card where the front contains the leetcode problem, description, and link, and the back contains the approach to solving the problem, key data structure used, and time and space complexity of approach. And when I go back and review the flashcards, I am able to note down how easily I could come up with the answer, Anki will manage how frequently I see the problem based on my answer.

Anki is a great program to use to interview prep as well as keep up our interviewing without much hassle throughout the year.