It is important that you do some prep work before practicing on Leetcode, GeeksForGeeks, or Cracking the Coding Interview (CTCI) — especially if you graduated from college a long time ago or are self-taught.

I realize that there are many articles about this subject, so I’m going to try and give valuable information that I wish I had when I started my journey.

I get extremely frustrated whenever I see kids on Youtube make “A day in life” videos. Instead of showing people what they actually do, they just showoff their playground work environment and sip boba in front of the camera. Ugh. Anyways, this isn’t a rant so let’s cut to the chase.

Inspired by Elad Gil’s blogpost and Patrick Collison’s website, I’ve compiled a list of people that hacked something together in a relatively short period of time. Most of them did it because they were trying to solve their own problems or wanted to create something they themselves wanted (reminds me of starting startups).

The best definition of a technology company is given by Marc Andreessen. His idea of a tech company is a company whose core product is tech innovation. IBM is an epitome of a technology company. So is Microsoft. Their core products are not operating systems or pos machines. Their core product is innovation.