tech-interview-handbook: A comprehensive guide to acing coding interviews
Project Overview
The tech interview preparation landscape is crowded with resources, but few have achieved the gravitational pull of the Tech Interview Handbook. With over 139,000 stars on GitHub, it’s one of the most-starred repositories on the platform — a signal that speaks to its utility rather than just its novelty[1]. What sets it apart from the countless ‘curated lists of LeetCode questions’ is that the author, Yangshun Tay, also created the Blind 75 — a curated set of 75 LeetCode problems that became something of a standard reference in the industry. The handbook reads less like a collection of links and more like a seasoned engineer walking you through the entire process, from resume crafting to offer negotiation. The project has evolved significantly since its early days, now encompassing a full static site with interactive features like the Grind 75 tool, which dynamically builds study plans based on your available time. It’s written in TypeScript and structured as a documentation site, making it both browsable online and forkable for offline use[2].
What It’s For
This handbook is designed for engineers who want structured, opinionated guidance through the technical interview process — particularly at large tech companies. If you’re the type who has stared at LeetCode’s 2,000+ problem list feeling paralyzed, this is the antidote. The author explicitly states the philosophy: not everyone has time to do hundreds of problems, so the handbook focuses on patterns and high-impact practice. It covers the full lifecycle: resume review, coding interview strategies (with topic-specific cheatsheets for arrays, graphs, dynamic programming, etc.), behavioral questions organized by company, and even system design prep. Where it really shines is in the non-algorithmic content — the behavioral interview section, for instance, includes actual questions asked by companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon, with frameworks for structuring answers. It’s less useful for senior engineers seeking deep system design theory (for that, you’d pair it with something like Designing Data-Intensive Applications), but for the standard mid-level software engineering loop, it’s remarkably comprehensive.
How to Use It
The primary way to engage with the handbook is through its website, which organizes content into logical tracks. The most distinctive workflow is the Grind 75 tool: you tell it how many weeks you have to prepare and your current experience level, and it generates a custom study plan with specific LeetCode problems ordered by difficulty and topic. This is a significant improvement over the original Blind 75 list, which was static and didn’t account for preparation timelines. For the algorithm sections, the recommended approach is to study by pattern — the handbook groups problems by data structure or algorithmic technique (e.g., ‘sliding window’, ‘binary search’, ‘trie’), with each section containing a cheatsheet of key insights before the practice problems. The resume guide includes before/after examples that demonstrate concrete formatting rules rather than abstract advice. One tradeoff worth noting: the handbook deliberately avoids providing full solutions or code walkthroughs for most problems, expecting you to solve them independently on LeetCode.
Access the Grind 75 tool to generate a personalized study plan based on your available preparation time and target companies
Visit https://www.techinterviewhandbook.org/grind75Review the algorithm cheatsheet organized by topic, covering time/space complexity tradeoffs and common patterns
Navigate to https://www.techinterviewhandbook.org/algorithms/study-cheatsheetFollow the step-by-step resume guide with before/after examples tailored for FAANG applications
Use https://www.techinterviewhandbook.org/resume/Recent Updates
Latest Release: N/A (N/A)
The repository does not use semantic versioning releases; updates are continuous via commits to the main branch.
The project maintains active community engagement through Discord and Telegram channels, with regular content updates. The most notable recent evolution is the expansion of the Grind 75 tool beyond the original Blind 75 problem set, reflecting community feedback that a one-size-fits-all list wasn’t optimal. The handbook’s trajectory suggests it’s moving toward becoming a more interactive platform rather than just a static reference, though it still faces the inherent challenge of keeping practice problem links current as LeetCode reorganizes its problem database.
Sources & Attributions
[1] Repository has 139,370 stars — yangshun/tech-interview-handbook [2] Primary language is TypeScript — yangshun/tech-interview-handbook