Hi All,

Its time for me to share my leetcode journey and experience for the past one year.
I have an experience of close to 17yrs. Last year i have decided to look out for a change considering that i have spent close to 11 years in the current company.
I have started Leetcoding from that time and slowly started with easy questions to get hands on and get some speed with coding.
Solved close to 800 problems by now.
First solved all easy questions(~300) then started solving medium.
Solved daily challenge regularly and also started participating in weekly/bi-weekly contests.
Initially i was able to solve only 2 questions in challenges and was taking more time.
Slowly with experience I was able to solve 3 questions regularly in the contests (though I haven't solved 4 questions in a contest till now)
So participating in the contests gave me real interview experience considering it is time bound and you can compare your performance w.r.t to the difficulty level of the contest.
After a few contests I was regularly in the top 30% and that increased my coding confidence.

So with this practice and confidence I started giving interviews.
Microsoft: Offer
Google: Reject (Attended all rounds)
Facebook: Reject (Attended all rounds)
Amazon: Rejected (Cleared screening but failed in first round - I already got an offer from Microsoft by this time and i was in notice period, so my office work was a bit more and couldn't focus on this interview)

Thanks to leetcode and leetcode community members for the inspiration, experiences and guidance
Now I am confident about my coding skills. Ofcouse there is always scope for improvement, I am still far from the ability to solve hard level questions
I need to focus a bit more on design rounds considering my interview experience so far

My strategy for practice:

1. Solved all easy questions initially to gain confidence in coding
2. Whenever I get stuck on a question and if I couldn't solve it in sometime, I will check the solution/discuss tab and try to understand it as much as possible and move on. This way I saved a lot of time and able to solve more problems.
3. Considering that I am more experienced I just thought I may not get hard questions in the interviews and that is the case so far atleast for me.
4. I used to revise a few questions before the interviews
5. It is also important to understand about time and space complexities of your solution and it is a critical point from interview perspective