In this video, I walk you through how I actually study for software engineering interviews—specifically how I approach a LeetCode problem when I haven’t practiced in a long time. And yeah, I’ll be honest: I personally haven’t touched LeetCode in 2+ years because there’s no point unless I’m actively interviewing. LeetCode doesn’t translate to being a good software engineer, but it does translate to passing interviews, so I only ramp up when I’m about to apply again. I use “Longest Valid Parentheses” as the example because it’s common, and I’ve seen it both as a candidate and as an interviewer. My process starts with reading the prompt, then immediately looking for missing details I’d ask in a real interview—like edge cases (empty string), input constraints (max length), and whether the input can contain other characters or brackets. I keep that clarification phase short (2–5 minutes) because time flies. Then I think of a rough approach (usually stack for parentheses), but I don’t code right away. I do multiple passes: first get familiar with patterns by scanning lots of questions, then come back later for pseudocode, and only after that do I write real code and submit. The main takeaway: even if you work at a big tech company, these questions are still hard, and it’s normal to need iterations to get them right.