Forem: FREEZE FRANCIS

# Cracking the Technical Interviews: A Strategic Roadmap 🚀

FREEZE FRANCIS — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 12:46:25 +0000

Facing technical interviews often feels like staring into a "black box" of unpredictable luck. Whether you are aiming for your first FAANG role or are a seasoned engineer seeking a fresh start, the pressure to perform can hit you like a truck.

After years of trial and error, from failing my first real architectural discussions to eventually working at companies like Amazon, Agoda, and Canva, I’ve realized that success isn’t about the volume of problems you solve. It is a test of your engineering strategy: how you think, how you build, and how you interact with a team.

Here is the high-level roadmap to the three pillars of a standard technical interview.

1. Technical Problem Solving 💻

Stop the "LeetCode grind". Many candidates fall into the trap of brute-forcing hundreds of problems, but interview prep is about strategy, not volume.

Focus on the "Medium" Sweet Spot: Spend 80% of your time on Medium difficulty problems, as they require actual application of specific data structures.
Optimization is Non-Negotiable: Don't just settle for an "Accepted" checkmark; you must find the most optimal solution to guarantee clearance.
Think Out Loud: Treat every interview like a pair programming session to give the interviewer a chance to guide your thought process.

Detailed Guide: How I Actually Prepare for Coding Interviews

2. Architectural Instincts 🏗️

System design is the competency that separates average engineers from senior ones. It’s about moving from memorizing patterns to developing genuine intuition.

Move Beyond Theory: Passing an interview is very different from building systems at scale; you need to understand how distributed systems behave under the hood.
Manufacture Experience: If you aren't getting design exposure at work, use solo whiteboarding and internal design docs to build your architectural muscle.
Trade-offs Over Templates: The breakthrough happens when you stop optimizing for the interview and start optimizing for true understanding.

Detailed Guide: How I Finally Cracked the System Design Interview

3. The Professional Narrative 🗣️

The behavioral round is a critical data extraction session where interviewers look for signals of ownership, empathy, and leadership maturity.

Build a "Story Bank": Prepare 5 to 7 key career moments—conflicts, failures, and leadership wins—to avoid a blank mind during the interview.
Master the STAR Ratio: Skew your answers heavily toward the Action (50%) and Result (30%), setting the scene quickly so you don't lose the interviewer's attention.
Be a Force Multiplier: Seniority is defined by your ability to lift the engineering bar of the entire team, not just your individual output.

Detailed Guide: How I Finally Cracked the Behavioural Interview

# The Engineer’s Guide to Anti-Scraping Protections

FREEZE FRANCIS — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 05:32:29 +0000

Data is the currency of the modern web. As software engineers, we are locked in a constant arms race: we build a feature, and within days, a bot is scraping it. We block an IP, they rotate proxies; we implement a CAPTCHA, they use a solving farm.

The truth is, there is no "silver bullet" to stop a motivated attacker. Instead, we use Defence in Depth—layering controls to raise the cost of the attack until scraping your site becomes unprofitable.

Here are two essential strategies from my ongoing series on bot mitigation.

1. Intelligent Rate Limiting 🚦

Traditional rate limiting is often a gamble: set it too high and the abuse continues; set it too low and you block legitimate users.

I advocate for a data-driven methodology using access logs to find the exact point where normal usage ends and abuse begins.

Key Takeaways:

The Impact Chart: Visualizing user traffic to surgically target malicious activity.
Safe Rollouts: Using A/B testing to deploy security rules without risking user experience.

👉Read the full implementation guide on Medium

2. Rotating CSS Selectors 🔄

Most scrapers rely on stable CSS selectors (like div.product-price) to find your data. If you make these targets move, you break their scripts.

By using modern build tools like Webpack, we can turn human-readable class names into random hashes. By introducing a "salt" into your CI/CD pipeline, you can rotate these class names every deployment.

Key Takeaways:

Breaking Dependencies: Attacking the scraper's reliance on a brittle DOM.
The Maintenance Tax: Shifting the burden of effort onto the attacker, making your site an unattractive target.

👉Deep dive into CSS Rotation on Medium

🍯 The Honeypot Strategy: Setting Traps for Bots

Most scrapers optimize for speed rather than perfect accuracy. They often interact with what exists in your raw code rather than what a human actually sees on the screen. A client-side honeypot exploits this by creating assets that look valuable to a bot but are invisible to legitimate users.

Key Defensive Tactics:

The UI Trap: Quietly inserting "ghost" elements into your HTML that are hidden via CSS (display: none). While humans never see them, scrapers parsing the raw DOM will often follow these links and reveal their automated nature.
The API Trap: Including "poisoned" objects within your JSON responses. Your legitimate frontend will filter these out before rendering, but automated harvesters blindly iterating through arrays will likely request the trap data.
Behaviour-Based Detection: Using a single trap hit as a signal, then combining it with request rates, navigation timing, and crawl patterns to accurately classify a client as a bot.
Soft Penalties: Instead of instant bans—which alert the attacker—use "soft degradation" like slowing down response times or injecting junk data to increase the scraper's operational costs.

👉 Read the full Honeypot guide on Medium

Conclusion

Effective anti-scraping is not about building a wall; it’s about building a maze. As scrapers get smarter, our defences must evolve.

If you found these strategies helpful, I would encourage you to consider following this post for future chapters.

Connect with me on Linktree to see my full portfolio.

Cracking the Tech Interview: My Master List of 10+ Interview Experiences 🚀

FREEZE FRANCIS — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 05:12:06 +0000

Navigating the tech interview process can feel overwhelming. Over the years, I’ve interviewed for Software Engineer roles at more than 10 different companies—ranging from FAANG giants like Google and Amazon to various fast-moving mid-sized companies.

To help you prepare, I’ve documented every experience in detail. This article is my master list—a central hub for all my interview write-ups. Whether you're targeting an SDE-I role or a senior engineer position, you can find the detailed breakdowns below.

🏢 FAANG & Big Tech

Google (Warsaw)

Amazon

🌏 International Opportunities

Canva (Australia): Senior Backend Engineer (B3) Experience
Grab (Singapore): Software Engineer Interview Breakdown
TikTok (Singapore): SDE-III Backend Interview
N26 (Berlin): Software Engineer Interview Guide
Foodpanda (Singapore): Staff/Principal Engineer Process
Mercari (Japan): Software Engineer (MG3) Experience
Glovo (Barcelona): L4/L3 Backend Engineer Interview
Agoda (Bangkok): Backend Interview Experience
Talabat (Dubai): Senior Backend Engineer Interview
Coda Payments (Bangkok): Staff Software Engineer Interview
Toptal: Freelance Developer Interview Process
Paidy (Japan): Software Engineer Interview
Directi: Platform Engineer (On-Campus)
Morgan Stanley: Software Engineer (On-Campus)
MathWorks: Application Support Engineer (On-Campus)

🧠 Preparation Strategy Guides

Mastering the interview requires a structured mindset. I've shared my personal frameworks for both technical and behavioral rounds:

Coding Rounds: Beyond the LeetCode Grind - My Preparation Strategy
Behavioral Rounds: How I Finally Cracked the "Soft" Round

Pro Tip: If you aren't a Medium member, look for the "READ for FREE: here" links inside each article on my Medium profile to access the full content.

What’s your biggest struggle with tech interviews right now? Let's discuss in the comments!

For more detailed stories and my full portfolio, connect with me on Linktree.

Amazon SDE-3 Interview

FREEZE FRANCIS — Sun, 06 Feb 2022 17:02:19 +0000

Overview

I recently gave an interview for the Amazon SDE-III role for the Alexa UK team and would like to share my experience in this article.

PS: You can read a more detailed version in my medium article here

Hiring Process

1 Technical Screening Round
5 Onsite Rounds
Final Offer

Initial Screening (60 minutes)

The interview was conducted by an SDE-3 engineer. He covered 3 aspects :

Problem-solving: Check if the given word is a concatenation of 2 words in a dictionary of words
System design: He asked to expose the above solution as a service and scale it to handle a large number of requests.
Behavioral Questions: He asked me a situation where I made a wrong design choice.

NOTE : I've signed an NDA, so to be safe I will not disclose the coding and system design questions

Onsite Round 1 (60 minutes)

I was interviewed by the hiring manager who is a Senior SDM. It was mostly behavioral. He asked the following:

situations where I gave direct feedback to peers.
situations where you mentored junior engineers.
situations where you worked on a challenging project with lots at stake.

In the final 15 minutes, he gave a system design problem.

Onsite Round 2 (60 minutes)

The interview was with a Principle Product Manager and was completely behavioral. He asked the following:

situations where I worked on an ambiguous project.
situations where I had to convince the entire team to break the norm and do things differently.

Onsite Round 3 (60 minutes)

The interview was conducted by a Principal Software Engineer. Initial half he covered behavioral skills and asked the following:

situations where you had to go beyond your comfort zone.
situations where you had to persuade your stakeholders to take a different approach.

In the latter half, he gave me a coding problem which was a medium difficulty leetcode problem based on linked lists.

Onsite Round 4 (60 minutes)

The interviewer was an SDE-3 engineer and he started off with the following behavioral questions:

situations where you disagreed with your team’s solution and convinced them with yours.
situations where you had to make a difficult decision.
situations where you had to agree with the team even though you disagreed.

In the second half, he asked me a medium coding problem which was a slightly modified form of a typical DP question.

Onsite Round 5 (60 minutes)

I think this was the Bar Raiser round and was again conducted by an SDE-3 engineer. He covered the following behavioral questions:

situations where you had a simple fix for a complex problem.
situations where you had an innovative idea that made its way to production.

In the second half, he gave me a hard leetcode graph problem.

Final Offer

The recruiter assured me that they will get back to me in 5 working days regarding the offer. On the 4th day, the recruiter called me and said that they won’t be making an SDE-III offer and if I’m interested they could find me an SDE-II opening which I politely refused.

For more interview experiences like this check out my articles here

Agoda Backend Engineer Interview

FREEZE FRANCIS — Sun, 23 Jan 2022 12:28:02 +0000

Overview

Agoda is one of the world’s largest online travel accommodation platforms. Back in 2019, I gave an interview with them and got an offer for backend software engineer. I will be sharing the complete details of my interview experience in this article.

A more detailed version of my interview can be found in my medium article here.

Agoda Hiring Process

Resume shortlisting
Hackerrank screening test
2 Skype technical rounds
4 F2F onsite technical rounds
Final offer stage

Screening Test

This was on hackerrank and had 25 MCQs with 2 additional coding questions.

Skype Round 1

The interviewer gave 2 coding problems:

Convert array into a linked list
Second was a greedy algorithm based question which can solved by sorting.

After this, he also touched upon some general technical questions.

Skype Round 2

The interviewer gave 1 coding problem:

Implement queue using arrays

After this, he started asking about basics of Distributed Systems like CAP Theorem and some general technical questions.

Since I cleared the Skype screening rounds they flew me to their Bangkok office and conducted the onsite rounds.

Onsite Round 1

Interviewer started off with a simple system design question:

How to replicate data across multiple data centers (DCs)?

After this, he asked me describe my current project on a white board.

Onsite Round 2

Interviewer asked 2 coding questions:

Onsite Round 3

Interviewer started off with the famous egg dropping problem.

After this, he asked some general technical questions.

Onsite Round 4

Interviewer gave a system design problem:

Design a sim card store system that gives you 3 sim cards on demand and each of them has a 10 digit long phone number.
- The generated numbers should be very hard to predict.
- We need to keep track of the phone numbers that are sold out and also the total unused numbers the system has at any point of time.
- Phone numbers should be stored very efficiently and retrieval of available phone numbers should be fast.

After a few days of the interview, I got a call from recruiter saying they are making me an offer!!

For more interview experiences, checkout my blogs here