Coding Best Practices.docx
- 1. Hello, My name is Raman and I am the CTO for McKinsey’s India Build Hub. Congratulations for clearing the Hackerrank test. You will now be moving to our code-pairing interviews. In this interview, you will be given a problem and we would expect you to develop a solution (in a programming language of your choice) using your problem-solving skills and adhering to software engineering best practices. Both these aspects (problem solving and SE best practices) are very important for succeeding in this round. You will be assigned a colleague of mine who will be evaluating you on its basis. Given below are some guidelines which will help you demonstrate your skills clearly to the evaluator. 1. Ask questions and state your assumptions: This will help establish a common understanding of the problem statement and clarify some of the ambiguous aspects of the given problem statement. 2. Write pseudo-code first: Pseudo code helps you to think clearly without getting bogged down by syntax and other constructs of programming languages. 3. Think of edge cases and solve for them too in consultation with your evaluator. 4. Think of optimization opportunities in terms of recursion, nested loops etc. Think of algorithm classes (Backtracking, Dynamic Programming, Greedy or others) that will help you optimize further. 5. Develop code in your favourite programming language but avoid using internal algorithm/collection libraries. The intention here is to demonstrate how strong your fundamentals are and not how good you are at using libraries. 6. Please give extra attention to good coding practices. We have attached coding practices for some of the commonly used programming languages. Please practice adhering to them before the code-pairing round. Well-written, readable, maintainable code is of paramount importance to us and that is a skill that we expect from all in our team. 7. Develop adequate test cases and test your solution before attempting to submit to the system. We also want to see how well you test your code before letting the system do it. Your evaluation will be based on all how well you do in all of the above aspects. Needless to say, we consider this as one of the most critical part of our evaluation and we want you to do extremely well here. Given below are some of the general programming best practices guidelines for you to start practicing and come prepared. We all look forward to meeting you. All the best.
- 2. General Guidelines: 1. Writing well-structured codes 2. Working code is better than non-working code 3. Having Proper Comments 4. Avoid heavy nesting a. Loops can become very slow if you don’t do them right b. keep computation-heavy code outside loops 5. Optimize loops 6. Proper Naming of Variables, Classes, Functions and Modules 7. Do not use Language Specific Build-in Methods E.g. - Do not use Build In String Methods, Array Methods, Data Structures, etc JavaScript Coding Best Practices: Naming Convention We sometimes come across variables like x1, fe2 or abc in JavaScript, or — on the other end of the spectrum — variable names like incrementorForMainLoopWhichSpansFromTenToTwenty or createNewMemberIfAgeOv erTwentyOneAndMoonIsFull. None of these make much sense — good variable and function names should be easy to understand and tell you what is going on. camelCase for identifier names (variables and functions) names start with a letter spaces around operators 2 spaces for indentation of code blocks Comments with // or /* */
- 3. Python Coding Best Practices: Naming Convention A variable name must start with a letter or the underscore character A variable name cannot start with a number A variable name can only contain alpha-numeric characters and underscores (A-z, 0-9, and _ ) Variable names are case-sensitive comment starts with a hash character (#) multiline comment (""") C++ Coding Best Practices: Naming Convention The first character of function/ method argument names should be lower case No special symbols can be used in variable names except for the underscore Digits may be used in the variable name but only after the alphabet The global constants should be all capital letters separated with ‘_’ Pointer variables should be prepended with ‘p’ and place the asterisk ‘*’ close to the variable name instead of pointer type The /* (slash, asterisk) characters, followed by any sequence of characters (including new lines), followed by the */ characters. This syntax is the same as ANSI C. The // (two slashes) characters, followed by any sequence of characters. Java Coding Best Practices: Naming Convention Method name should start with lowercase letter, be a verb such as main(), print(), println() If the method name contains multiple words, start it with a lowercase letter followed by an uppercase letter such as actionPerformed(). Variable should start with a lowercase letter such as id, name. We should use camelcases variable names. E.g. firstName, lastName Avoid using one-character variables such as x, y, z. Have meaningful variable and method names Constant should be in uppercase letters such as RED, YELLOW. Never leave a Catch Blocks empty. Using enhanced for loops instead of for loops with counter