Multi-Key Sorting — The Tuple Trick Interviewers Love

Junior DE interviews almost always involve sorting by multiple fields. 'Sort events by timestamp, then by user_id alphabetically for ties.' The way you handle this signals your Python fluency immediately. There are three ways to do it — and only one of them is what interviewers want to see. The Amazon Log File Question (You Will See This) This exact problem appears in Amazon DE interviews regularly. You have a list of log strings — some are 'letter-logs' (content after the identifier is all words), some are 'digit-logs' (content is all numbers). Sort so letter-logs come first, sorted by content, then identifier as a tiebreaker. Digit-logs maintain their original relative order at the end. This tests categorical primary sorting with different rules per category.