Python Practice Problems
Python Practice Problems
Live Python practice problems for data engineer roles with hidden test cases including Unicode, DST, and performance budgets.
415 Python practice problems shaped like real data engineer work: dict and set fluency, file parsing and validation, sessionization, retry logic with jittered backoff, generator-based streaming. Live Python 3.11 sandbox with public and hidden test cases.
Python practice for data engineer roles is structurally different from Python practice for software engineer interviews. The catalog here optimizes for pipeline-shaped work: parsing the kind of malformed CSV that ships from a third-party export, deduplicating events with composite keys and tiebreakers, walking nested JSON with a recursive flattener that handles both lists-as-records and lists-as-attributes, sessionizing event streams with itertools.groupby or a plain for-loop, writing a retry decorator with exponential backoff plus random jitter (the no-jitter version is a self-DDoS waiting to happen), streaming a 50GB file with a generator so memory stays constant regardless of input size, and implementing pandas SCD Type 2 merge logic the way a real warehouse pipeline would.
Public tests are visible in the problem statement so the data engineer can read the input shape and the expected output. Hidden tests reveal after the public ones pass and typically include empty input, single-element edge cases, Unicode user IDs (because emoji and CJK characters break naive byte-counting), event timestamps at the DST boundary (which break naive timezone math), and a 100k-record performance test with a wall-clock budget that fails O(n-squared) solutions. The performance test is not a separate "optimize this" problem; it is woven into the same problem statement and fails the same submission if your solution is quadratic.
Scratch panel mode runs the same Python 3.11 environment as the test runner. Print, debug, and explore the test inputs before submitting. The scratch panel does not count against any submission limit; there is no submission limit. Library coverage: pandas, polars, numpy, pyarrow, json, csv, re, itertools, collections, heapq, datetime, requests, asyncio, and tenacity. PySpark problems run in a separate sandbox at /pyspark-interview-questions with the standard pyspark imports.
The catalog is graded on 5 dimensions in submission analytics: correctness against public tests, correctness against hidden tests, performance against the wall-clock budget, error handling for malformed input, and Pythonic style (idiomatic data structure choice, clear naming, narrow exception catching). The first 3 are binary pass-or-fail. The last 2 are inferred from the submission code and surfaced as feedback after the submission completes. Data engineer candidates who pass correctness but fail performance typically need to switch from nested loops to dict lookups (O(n-squared) to O(n)) or from list accumulation to generator streaming (O(memory) to O(1)).
- What kind of Python do these practice problems test?
- Pipeline-shaped Python: parsing malformed CSVs without crashing, deduplicating events with composite keys and tiebreakers, walking nested JSON, sessionizing event streams, writing retry decorators with jittered backoff, streaming large files with generators. About 4 percent of problems are algorithm puzzles for breadth; the other 96 percent are pipeline work that mirrors real production code at data engineer-shaped companies.
- How do public and hidden test cases work?
- Public tests are visible in the problem statement so a data engineer can read the input shape and expected output. Hidden tests reveal one at a time after the public tests pass. Hidden bucket typically includes empty input, Unicode (emoji, CJK characters), DST boundary timestamps, and a 100k-record performance test with a wall-clock budget that fails O(n-squared) solutions.
- What libraries are available in the Python sandbox?
- pandas, polars, numpy, pyarrow, json, csv, re, itertools, collections, heapq, datetime, requests, asyncio, tenacity. PySpark runs in a separate sandbox. ML libraries (scikit-learn, torch) are not in scope; this is data engineer practice, not ML engineer practice.
- How do I see why a hidden test failed?
- The runner comes back with the input shape, the expected output shape, and the assertion that broke. Performance failures report wall-clock time against the threshold. Correctness failures point at the first divergent element of the diff. Submit, read what broke, fix the assumption behind it, resubmit. It is the same loop you run on a take-home when the reviewer sends it back.
- Are there time limits on submissions?
- No per-problem time limit on writing code. The performance tests have wall-clock budgets (typically 1 to 5 seconds for a 100k-record input), enforced inside the sandbox. Quadratic solutions usually fail performance tests; linear or O(n log n) solutions pass with margin.
- Can I use pandas for problems that do not explicitly require it?
- Yes. Any valid Python solution passes. Pandas is often the cleanest expression: a SCD Type 2 merge in pandas is roughly 10 lines versus roughly 30 in vanilla Python. The interview rubric varies by company. Some prefer vanilla to verify you understand the underlying data structures. Others want pandas because production code uses it. A data engineer should mention both in interview discussion.
- What is the difference from LeetCode Python practice?
- LeetCode emphasizes algorithm puzzles (graph traversal, DP, sliding window). This catalog emphasizes pipeline patterns (parsing, dedup, validation, ETL flow). LeetCode performance tests are tight on algorithmic complexity. This catalog's performance tests are tight on memory bounds (streaming versus buffering) and IO patterns more than on Big-O. About 4 percent topical overlap; the rest is different territory for data engineer prep.
415 practice problems matching this filter. Difficulty: medium (201), hard (26), easy (188).
Python (415)
- Above the Title - medium - Some names carry a genre. Total the box office behind them.
- Absent Without Leave - medium - Between the first name and the last, the ones who never showed. Account for them.
- Against the Current - hard - Too big to load. Read what you can.
- Against the Grain - medium - Turn the grid on its side and let every column stand up as a row.
- All the Way Down - medium - However deep it nests, every leaf belongs on one line.
- All Told - easy - Every shift leaves a number behind. Total the fleet.
- Back to Back - medium - Windows stacked on windows. Find the real spans.
- Batch Records - medium - Too many at once. Break them into groups.
- Between the Clicks - medium - Clicks arrive scrambled. Find where one visit ends and the next begins.
- Between the Pings - medium - The fleet never stops talking. Find where each vehicle paused.
- Birds of a Feather - medium - Every record finds its kin; keep them in the order they arrived.
- By What They Answer To - medium - Every name reports to its first letter. Sort the roll call as it comes in.
- Caesar Shift Check - easy - The key turns. Does it open?
- Carrying Forward - medium - The total grows with every row.
- Carry the One - medium - In grade-school subtraction you scribble a mark each time you borrow. Recover those marks.
- Char Profile - medium - Every character in the string tells a story.
- Closing Bell - medium - Every share you own, priced at today's close. Tally the gains.
- Closing Time - easy - Every bracket you open is a promise. Check that the parser keeps all of them.
- Column Range - easy - From minimum to maximum. What is the spread?
- Corner to Corner - medium - A grid pressed flat still remembers its corners.
- Detect Outliers - medium - Most values are normal. Some are suspicious.
- Dice Roll Scoring - medium - The pattern rewards the patient.
- Dictionary Key Intersection - medium - Two dictionaries. What do they share?
- Dominant Element - easy - Majority element. Appears more than half the time.
- Double Duty - medium - Split the money. Some wore two hats.
- Downstream - hard - Nothing runs until what it needs has run.
- Down the Line - medium - Load has to keep moving. Pass it down the line.
- Even Filter - easy - Only the even ones survive.
- Every Line on the Receipt - medium - Nested deep inside the receipt. Pull every item out.
- Everything Beneath - medium - Every account carries the weight of all it contains.
- Everything That Repeats - easy - Say it once, then say how many times it stayed.
- Every Trace - medium - It is in there somewhere. Where exactly?
- Execution Timer Wrapper - medium - Function wrapped with a timer. Duration captured on exit.
- Explode List - easy - One row holds many values. Unpack it.
- Extract Domain - easy - The domain is buried in the string.
- Extract Leaf Values - medium - The tree has leaves. Pluck them.
- Faces in the Crowd - medium - New arrivals keep showing up. Count the ones you have not seen yet.
- Familiar Ground - medium - Keep walking. Sooner or later you may recognize where you're standing.
- Find Mode - medium - One value appears more than the rest.
- Footprints in the Feed - medium - Every trade left a footprint.
- Full Circle - medium - Follow the chain long enough and it might loop back.
- Greeting Formatter Class - easy - First impressions are formatted carefully.
- Group Average - hard - Same group, different values. What is typical?
- Hands Apart - easy - Two hands. One gap. One number.
- Hidden Depths - medium - Each dot marks a level. Rebuild the tree it stands for.
- Higher Ground - medium - Somewhere the ground stops climbing.
- High Water - easy - Every reading remembers the highest that came before.
- High Water Mark - easy - Even below zero, one reading still stands above the rest.
- Holding the Center - hard - The middle value keeps moving as new data arrives.
- Into One Stream - easy - Some arrive alone, some in batches. Line them all up.
- Letters in the Noise - easy - Case and punctuation are distractions. Find what each letter really weighs.
- Max Length Token - medium - The longest token wins.
- Members Only - easy - Every digit wants in. Only the odd ones make the cut.
- Merge Counters - medium - Two tallies. Combine them.
- Moving Day - hard - Old schema in, new schema out.
- Next in Line - medium - Every server gets its turn. Keep the line honest as the pool changes.
- No Days Off - medium - Show up every day. Miss one and the count starts over.
- No One Left Behind - medium - Every record stays; fill the gaps where a match exists.
- Normalize Name - easy - Names are messy. Standardize them.
- No Shortcuts - easy - The peak value. Built-ins off the table.
- No Vacancy - hard - Every booking needs a room. Find the busiest moment.
- Null Counter - easy - How many holes in the data?
- One Step Behind - medium - What came before this row?
- Open and Shut - easy - Every opener is a promise. The order you close them in decides whether it holds.
- Ordered Character Check - easy - Check if all As appear before all Bs.
- Out of Nowhere - hard - Every stream has a rhythm. Find the readings that break it.
- Parse Log Line - medium - One line. A dozen fields hidden inside.
- Points of Order - medium - Every page makes its case for the top. Settle it, and settle the ties.
- Precision and Recall - medium - Precision and recall. Both matter.
- Prefix Based Word Replacement - medium - Every word trimmed to its root.
- Progress Milestones - easy - Progress at every 10% increment. Keep the receipts.
- Quality Gate - easy - Not everything passes inspection.
- Quantile Calculator - easy - Mark the boundary value at a given point.
- Read Both Ways - easy - Placeholders hide in plain sight. The symmetric ones give themselves away.
- Reads The Same Both Ways - medium - Somewhere in the noise, a stretch that mirrors itself. Find the longest one.
- Record Filter - easy - Some records belong. Others do not.
- Rename Keys - medium - Old names out. New names in.
- Reverse Field - easy - Flip it. See what happens.
- Right of Way - medium - Every packet asks the same question of the firewall. Answer it the way the table intends.
- Roots and Branches - medium - Flat strings carry a hierarchy. Recover it.
- Round and Round They Go - medium - Each face waits its turn as the wheel comes back around.
- Row Aggregates - medium - Each row holds its own summary.
- Sanitize Field - easy - Dirty input. Clean output.
- Schema Checker - easy - The schema says one thing. The data says another.
- Sequential Word Pairs - easy - Everything has a neighbor.
- Shortest Unique Metric Tag - medium - One token per metric. Make it unambiguous.
- Single Element Among Pairs - easy - One element has no partner.
- Single File - easy - However deep the nesting, every voice arrives in its own turn.
- Skip a Beat - easy - Two in a row is never allowed. Collect the most from what remains.
- Sort Descending - easy - Biggest first. No exceptions.
- Steady State - medium - Turn a jittery stream into a calm read, one step at a time.
- Stock Range Finder - medium - Prices move. One stretch had the widest gap.
- Subarray Signal - medium - One stretch carries the strongest signal.
- Sum of Their Parts - medium - A stream of raw actions, folded into one portrait per person.
- The Account Manager - easy - Deposits, withdrawals, and a ledger you can walk back.
- The Additive Chain - easy - Each value is the sum of the two before it - no calls to itself allowed.
- The Address Surgeon - easy - One string hides a street, a city, a state, and a zip.
- The Alphabet Score - easy - Every letter has a secret numeric value - what's your total?
- The Alphabet Sorter - easy - Filing cabinet logic: everything goes in its proper drawer.
- The Balanced Inspector - medium - Every branch should carry the same weight.
- The Balanced Sum - easy - Some numbers have a rare quality that mathematicians revere.
- The Bipartite Test - medium - Can this crowd be split into two perfectly separated groups?
- The Bit Counter - easy - How many lights are on in the binary representation?
- The Bit Reverser - medium - Sometimes the answer is literally backwards.
- The Bitwise Judge - easy - No division, no modulo - just a single bit tells you everything.
- The Blind Multiplier - medium - Compute the result of everything around you - without seeing yourself.
- The Bonus Round - medium - Consecutive matching dice rolls trigger a special scoring rule.
- The Bouncer - easy - Every door has a guest list.
- The Bronze Medalist - easy - Not first, not last - somewhere in the middle of the podium.
- The Bug Spotter - easy - It compiles. The answer is still wrong.
- The Build Order - medium - Some tasks must wait for others to finish first.
- The Calendar Sort - easy - Time has its own opinion about order.
- The Carousel - easy - Keep moving, same ride.
- The Chain Transform - medium - One small step at a time can cover a great distance.
- The Change Tracker - medium - Before and after snapshots. The delta is in there.
- The Character Clans - medium - Words sharing the same letters belong to the same clan.
- The Character Map - easy - Every character leaves a trace. Add them up.
- The Chunked Reader - medium - Too big for one payload. Ship it in pieces.
- The Cipher Wheel - easy - Every letter has an alias - you just need the right codebook.
- The Clock Examiner - medium - Two hands on a clock: how wide is the gap?
- The Code Expander - easy - Compressed messages need a decoder to come alive.
- The Coin Vault - medium - Exact change only - and you want to use as few coins as possible.
- The Column Shuffle - medium - Rows in, columns out. Number them.
- The Column Transformer - easy - Each column gets its function.
- The Complement Hunt - easy - Every number is looking for its other half.
- The Config Blender - easy - Config collision. The surviving values after a merge.
- The Counting Machine - medium - It knows where it stopped last time.
- The Crowd Favorite Eatery - easy - One restaurant clearly won the most hearts.
- The Crowd Pleaser - easy - One value shows up more than all others combined.
- The Crowd Splitter - easy - The middle holds even with a dominant outlier.
- The Custom Iterator - medium - Some sequences follow their own rules.
- The Date Sorter - medium - Jumbled calendar. Sort it first.
- The Decomposer - easy - Every composite thing can be broken down to its simplest parts.
- The Deep Config - medium - Every setting has a path. Trace it down to the value.
- The Deep Dictionary - easy - One key goes further than the rest.
- The Deep Dive - easy - A specific position in the unsorted pile.
- The Deep Selector - easy - Tell it what you want. It knows where to look.
- The Deep Unpacker - easy - Boxes inside boxes. Eventually you reach the bottom.
- The Dependency Resolver - medium - Everything depends on everything.
- The Depth of Field - easy - Some containers hold containers that hold containers.
- The Diagonal Accountant - easy - Two diagonals cross in the center of every square.
- The Dict Comparator - medium - Two dictionaries. Subtle differences.
- The Disputed Fare - medium - One charge, two legs. Finance needs to know which two.
- The Dominant Signal - easy - Hottest items in the transaction log. Ties included.
- The Double-Ended Gateway - medium - Some queues let you skip the line from both ends.
- The Dynamic Container - hard - Grow your own storage before the standard library does it for you.
- The Elevator Trace - medium - Nested floors. One path through.
- The Email Ranker - medium - Some inboxes see more action.
- The Encoded Signal - medium - Letters folded into digits, counts hidden in the punctuation.
- The Even Checkpoint - easy - Is this number in the even club? Prove it the fast way.
- The Event Bucketer - easy - Logs slotted into buckets.
- The Event Window - medium - A five-minute window is all that matters.
- The Eviction Policy - medium - Fixed capacity. The key left idle longest is the one that goes.
- The Exception Handler - medium - Good code handles failure as gracefully as success.
- The Expander - easy - What goes in small comes out big.
- The Face That Breaks the Bank - medium - Roll enough dice and one number always runs away with it.
- The Fallback Layer - easy - When the live values come back empty, something has to stand in.
- The Family Reunion - medium - Two cousins share a common ancestor somewhere above.
- The Fast Climber - medium - Some routes up the mountain are faster than others.
- The Field Counter - easy - Some fields speak louder than others.
- The File Size Profiler - medium - File types and their disk footprint. One type dominates.
- The Fine Print - medium - Risk rules nest deep. Decide which transactions clear them.
- The Firehose - medium - A stream arrives out of order. Roll it up, one time window at a time.
- The First Class Function - medium - Functions travel as values - prove you can pass one around.
- The First Encounter - easy - Every character has a story - but only if you remember where it started.
- The First of Their Kind - easy - When the same record arrives twice, only the first one survives.
- The First Stranger - easy - In a crowd, the unique ones stand out first.
- The Flat Mapper - medium - Nested values. One flat stream out.
- The Forbidden Ceiling - easy - Round up. But not the obvious way.
- The Forbidden Sorter - medium - Put the letters in order without the obvious tool.
- The Forgetful Machine - medium - It remembers everything, until it does not.
- The Forward Fill - easy - Patch the gaps in a noisy sensor stream.
- The Frequency Eviction - hard - When storage is tight, something has to go.
- The Fuller Copy - medium - The same listing lands twice, half-filled each time. Keep what is whole.
- The Gap Filler - easy - Fill the Nones with the last real value.
- The Gaps Between - hard - The data is not as clean as it looks.
- The Gate Keeper - easy - Not all openings have a closing.
- The Generous Ones - medium - The generous ones are obvious.
- The Grid Pivot - easy - A different angle reveals a completely different picture.
- The Half-Life Search - medium - Every guess cuts the problem in half.
- The Halftime Score - easy - Middle value of a dataset. No built-in shortcuts.
- The Hash Stamper - easy - One input, one irreversible output - the foundation of every secret.
- The High Mark - easy - Scan the list. Report the max.
- The High Rollers - medium - Not every gambler bets the same - some wager far more than others.
- The Horizon Scanner - medium - For each position, what is coming up ahead?
- The Hostile Takeover - medium - One dict eats another.
- The Hourly Bucket - medium - Timestamps belong somewhere.
- The Indivisibles - easy - Numbers that yield only to themselves.
- The Infection Spread - hard - It starts with one, and then it spreads.
- The Integer Sieve - easy - Not everything in this list belongs here.
- The Intervals - medium - Timestamps in buckets.
- The IP Validator - easy - Real and fake, mixed together.
- The Island Counter - medium - Surrounded by water, connected by land - how many separate landmasses?
- The Last Instance - easy - When duplicates appear, only the last one counts.
- The Last Known Good - medium - When a column goes quiet, its last reading keeps standing.
- The Last Seen Map - easy - For each character, where did it appear last?
- The Lazy Squares - easy - A sequence that never fully reveals itself.
- The Lazy Stream - hard - Some slots hold one value, some hold a batch. Level them out.
- The Lazy Unpacker - medium - Peel back every layer until only the values remain.
- The Letter Census - easy - Every crowd has its share of talkers and quiet ones.
- The Letter Frequency Map - easy - Count every character in the string and report the results.
- The Letter Kin - medium - Words that share the same letters belong together.
- The Letter Ledger - easy - Every character has a count to answer for.
- The Letter Mapper - medium - A consistent substitution, or not.
- The Letter Tally - easy - Each character in the string has a count to answer for.
- The Level Inspector - medium - Each floor of the tower tells a different story.
- The Level Summer - medium - Every tier of the hierarchy keeps its own total.
- The Line Cutter - easy - Did everyone with an A-pass get through before the B-crowd arrived?
- The Line Splitter - easy - Comma-separated truths, one at a time.
- The Link Shrinker - medium - Long addresses have aliases - you give them out, you keep the map.
- The Listeners - medium - Subscribers show up, listen, and sometimes leave.
- The List Merger - easy - No shortcuts.
- The Log Decoder - easy - Every line holds a secret.
- The Log Pulse - easy - Some lines repeat themselves.
- The Lone Character - easy - It appeared exactly one time. That made it special.
- The Lone Traveler - easy - One character stands apart from the crowd.
- The Long Run - easy - Say it once, then say how many times it kept saying it.
- The Long Way Around - easy - Anyone can call the function. Order it by hand.
- The Loudest Voice - medium - One event type is drowning out the rest. Find it.
- The Low That Came Too Late - easy - You only get to buy before you sell. Find the biggest gain the day allowed.
- The Map Reducer - medium - Map it. Reduce it. One answer.
- The Market Streak - medium - Some stocks run longer than you think.
- The Market Timer - medium - Buy low, sell later. The whole game is when.
- The Matching Manifest - easy - Two warehouses, one shipment - only load what's in both.
- The Merge - easy - Chaos in. Order out.
- The Merge Champion - medium - Many sorted rivers flowing into one.
- The Messy Pipeline - easy - The upstream API has no idea what a schema is.
- The Middle Ground - hard - The middle value keeps moving.
- The Min Tracker - medium - The stack remembers the best it ever saw.
- The Minutes Tracker - easy - Some activities eat more time than others.
- The Mirror Flip - easy - Sometimes the fastest fix is to swap everything.
- The Mirror Image - easy - Flip the tape backwards - start from the end.
- The Mirror Index - easy - Every value remembers who pointed to it.
- The Mirror Test - easy - Check if a string reads the same forwards and backwards.
- The Mirror Words - easy - Each word looks back at itself.
- The Missing Number - easy - Something is missing from the sequence.
- The Molecule Report - easy - Four letters. A lot of math hidden in the sequence.
- The Month-by-Month Snapshot - medium - Every salesperson has a story. The months just tell it sideways.
- The Multiplication Trail - easy - Each step multiplies the whole journey.
- The Multiplier Rush - medium - Negatives cancel negatives - but only if you keep both in view.
- The Narrow Lens - medium - A narrow timeframe. Everything inside matters.
- The Nearest Value Mapper - medium - Close enough counts. Ties go low.
- The Never-Ending Sequence - easy - Sequence that keeps going. Follow it.
- The Numbered Chair - easy - A standing list. Position n holds one entry.
- The Number Miner - medium - JSON strings are hiding numeric secrets. Dig them out.
- The Number Narrator - medium - Every number has a story in words.
- The Number Screen - easy - Some numbers make the cut. Most do not.
- The Odd Digits - easy - Hidden inside a mess of characters are a few odd numbers.
- The Odd Extractor - easy - Not all numbers from a string are welcome here.
- The Ones That Come Back - easy - In a column that promised uniqueness, some values kept their seat. Name them.
- The Ones That Count - easy - Not every minute counts. Add up the ones that do.
- The One-Timers - easy - Values that never repeated.
- The One-Way Street - easy - The longest stretch that never turns around.
- The Onion Layer - hard - Peel from the outside in - one ring at a time.
- The Online Elite - medium - The top performers are hiding in the data.
- The Only Difference - easy - Two versions of the same line. Surface only what changed.
- The OOP Pillars Exam - medium - Four principles, one class hierarchy - show you know all of them.
- The Op Dispatcher - easy - Name the operation, apply it everywhere.
- The Order Enforcer - easy - Some rules say every A must come before every B.
- The Order Inspector - medium - A binary tree has rules - is this one actually following them?
- The Original Keeper - easy - Clean up duplicate events without losing the timeline.
- The Output Peak - hard - One stretch outpaced all the others.
- The Overlap - hard - Overlapping windows are one outage. Collapse them into the truth.
- The Overlap Finder - easy - Two guest lists - who made it onto both?
- The Overwritten Hour - medium - The log wrapped on itself. The order is still there, just not where you would look.
- The Page Turner - medium - Nobody loads everything at once.
- The Pair Counter - easy - How many pairs can be formed from the crowd?
- The Paired Doors - easy - Every door you open is a promise to close it, in order.
- The Parentheses Factory - medium - Building balanced brackets is an art form.
- The Pascal Row - easy - Each number is the sum of two numbers above it.
- The Password Builder - easy - Random characters, fixed rules.
- The Password Forge - easy - Does this password pass the strength gate?
- The Path Inward - medium - Every setting hides a few levels down. Follow the route, or come back empty.
- The Pay Ladder - medium - Climb the ladder the hard way. No shortcuts allowed.
- The Peak Finder - easy - Largest number in the list. Max() is not an option.
- The Perfect Match - medium - Two numbers walk into an interview...
- The Placement Fixer - medium - Each value belongs in exactly one spot.
- The Portfolio - medium - Count every bed under a name. The largest holdings rise first.
- The Postfix Processor - medium - Math without parentheses - the operators come after the numbers.
- The Precision Hunt - medium - Some answers need no decimal point.
- The Price Bander - easy - Different prices, different treatment.
- The Priority Queue - medium - When two things tie, something has to break the deadlock.
- The Progress Meter - medium - Ten glimpses of a run, no matter how long it ran.
- The Progress Parade - easy - Just tell them how far along you are.
- The Quarter Turn - medium - One rotation changes everything.
- The Queue Disguise - medium - A queue in sheep's clothing.
- The Quiet Drift - medium - Two versions of the same truth.
- The Quiet Hours - medium - Overlapping outages hide how much time is really dark. Collapse them into the truth.
- The Ranked Dict - easy - Values deserve order too.
- The Repeat Offenders - easy - Repetition is a clue.
- The Repeat Review - medium - The echo came back.
- The Repeat Visitor - medium - Loyal customers come back sooner than expected.
- The Response Aggregator - medium - Multiple result pages. One clean summary.
- The Resume Sifter - medium - Pull what's useful. Skip what you know.
- The Roll Call - easy - Every value is waiting for its name.
- The Rolling Peak - medium - The sweetest stretch in the sequence.
- The Roman Converter - easy - Roman numerals decoded.
- The Rotated Array - medium - Someone shuffled it. Now locate what you came for.
- The Runner-Up - easy - Not the winner. The one just behind it.
- The Running Total - easy - Each position holds the sum of everything before it.
- The Safe Caster - easy - Type conversion is easy, until it is not.
- The Schedule Cleaner - medium - Overlapping sessions. One clean line.
- The Schema Diff - medium - Two versions of the same config - what changed between them?
- The Scoreboard Race - medium - The first to cross the line ends the game, mid-round or not.
- The Score Sorter - easy - Points on the board, sorted by who earned the most.
- The Scramble Check - easy - Same letters, different order - are these two strings secret twins?
- The Second Summit - easy - Not the top of the mountain - just below it.
- The Secret Twins - easy - Same letters, different disguises.
- The Self-Portrait Number - easy - Some numbers describe themselves perfectly.
- The Sequel Spotter - easy - Spot the sequels hiding in the catalog.
- The Shadow Cleaner - easy - Remove the repeats. No shortcuts.
- The Shape They All Share - medium - A pile of exports, no two quite alike. Keep only what every record agrees on.
- The Shifting Standard - medium - A benchmark in motion.
- The Short Address - medium - Every link needs a slug small enough to type by hand.
- The Shortest Path Home - medium - Every leaf remembers the road it came from. Bring them all back on one line.
- The Shortest Route - medium - Fewer hops is always better.
- The Shortlist - medium - In every field, only a few rise to the top. Keep them.
- The Silent Locator - easy - Every lookup should cost you less than the one before it.
- The Silver Screen Summit - medium - Box office totals decide who makes the top of the marquee.
- The Single Bit - easy - One particular pattern hides in plain sight.
- The Slow Leak - medium - Nested groups. One flat stream.
- The Sneaky Twins - medium - They look different but they are the same inside.
- The Social Graph - easy - Everyone knows someone.
- The Solo Act - easy - One-and-done values only.
- The Spaces Between - medium - Every voided trip leaves a hole in the sequence. Find the one that matters.
- The Spin Doctor - medium - Ninety degrees, but which way?
- The Spiral Harvest - medium - The snail reads the grid in its own special order.
- The Spread - easy - Data spread around a center. The range matters.
- The Squeeze - easy - aaabbb gets old fast. Shrink it.
- The Staircase Problem - medium - One step or two, the choices add up.
- The Status Board - medium - A pile of raw access logs, and two numbers that matter hiding inside the quotes.
- The Step Counter - easy - You can hop one step or two - how many ways to reach the top?
- The Streak Breaker - easy - It has a problem with repetition.
- The Stream Averager - easy - The answer moves with the data.
- The Stream Joiner - hard - Events don't wait for each other. This does.
- The String Shrinker - easy - Compress the string. Shorter wins.
- The Style Guide - easy - Not every word deserves the same treatment.
- The Sum of Its Parts - medium - Every assembly hides smaller ones. Count what it really takes to build.
- The Syntax Sentinel - easy - Brackets opened and closed. The nesting might be off.
- The Table Thief - medium - Somewhere in that query, tables are hiding.
- The Tag Analyst - medium - Two sets of labels, one analysis.
- The Tail End - easy - Push, pop, peek. The basics that break people.
- The Tail Finder - medium - Navigate to the end of a linked list using recursion.
- The Tail Trimmer - easy - Remove the k-th item from the back without counting forward first.
- The Tallest Stacks - medium - Every terminal has its records. Find the two that stand tallest.
- The Tally Counter - easy - How many times does a single guest show up to the party?
- The Target Hunt - medium - Pairs that hit a target. Every one of them.
- The Throttle Ceiling - medium - Too many requests in too short a timeframe. Throttle it.
- The Throttle Wall - hard - Stop the abusers. Let the rest through.
- The Timezone Trap - medium - Trip data and timezones. They're not the same thing.
- The Timing Decorator - medium - Wrap any function to capture how long it takes.
- The Title Ladder - medium - Job titles and the salary tier they belong to.
- The Top Reviewer - easy - One restaurant receives the most feedback - which one?
- The Top Words - medium - In every document, some words dominate the conversation.
- The Trade Signal - easy - Buy low, sell high. Identify the ideal moment.
- The Traffic Director - easy - Spread the load evenly - nobody should be doing all the work.
- The Trapped Pool - hard - What collects in the valleys after the rain?
- The Tree Measurer - easy - How deep does the rabbit hole go?
- The Trip Aggregator - medium - Travel records hold patterns waiting to be surfaced.
- The Trip Grouper - easy - Where did everyone go, and for how long?
- The Triple Alliance - hard - Three numbers, one target.
- The Triplet Hunt - medium - Every path that works gets a seat at the table.
- The Type Sorter - easy - A mixed list is hiding its numbers - extract them.
- The Unbroken Line - medium - The longest stretch that never repeats itself.
- The Value Sorter - easy - The order was always negotiable.
- The Velvet Rope - medium - Some users get in. Others wait outside until the window resets.
- The Version Parade - easy - 1.0 before 2.0. Don't let the dots confuse you.
- The Version Ranker - medium - Software versions follow their own ordering rules.
- The Vocabulary Test - medium - Every character has to come from a word you already know.
- The Vowel Hunt - easy - Just the vowels. All of them.
- The Waiting Game - medium - Patience has a price - and a count.
- The Water Collector - hard - Two walls, one sky, and a very important question.
- The Water Gauge - medium - Elevation bars trap water in the dips. Total the volume.
- The Weight of the Book - medium - Every holding pulls its weight. Order the asset classes by what they carry, and let the ties settle by name.
- The Wide View - hard - Long format is easy. Wide format is useful.
- The Window Cleaner - medium - Keep it fresh, keep it unique.
- The Word Census - easy - Who said what - and how many times?
- The Word Counter - easy - How many times does each word show up in a file?
- The Word Families - medium - Different spellings, same letters - they belong together.
- The Word Flipper - easy - The sentence stays, the words surrender.
- The Word Inventory - easy - Every word, twice over.
- The Word Map - easy - Language, quantified.
- The Yahtzee Engine - hard - Five dice. Six faces. Score it.
- The Yahtzee Scorer - medium - Dice scoring. Multiple categories evaluated.
- The Zero Propagator - medium - One zero can change the whole picture.
- The Zigzag Encoder - medium - The message snakes its way across the rails.
- Three That Hold - medium - Not every triangle is a triangle.
- Threshold Filter - medium - Above the line or below it.
- Top-Heavy - medium - The widest row leads, and everything below it narrows.
- Top N Keys - medium - Most of them do not matter. The few that do stand out.
- Transform Column - easy - Same data, new shape.
- Twice on the Wire - easy - A dropped ACK makes the reader say it again. Keep the signal, drop the echo.
- Unbroken - easy - A single dip resets the clock. Find the longest the machine held steady.
- Unique Values - easy - Duplicates are noise. Remove them.
- Validate Email - medium - Looks like an email. But is it?
- Value Count - easy - How many of each? Count them.
- Ways of Reading - medium - One key, no separators, and more than one story it could tell.
- What Changed Overnight - medium - Schema from yesterday vs today. Something changed.
- What's Left Standing - medium - They only meet head-on, and only mass decides who keeps going.
- What Stays Warm - medium - Memory is small and the stream never stops. Keep only what was just asked for, in the order it was asked.
- What the Card Remembers - medium - A hold on your money is never a single moment. Rebuild the windows it actually lived in.
- What the Day Left Open - medium - Every fill moves a position. Reconstruct where the book settled by the close.
- What the Night Changed - hard - Two photographs of the same table, a day apart. Account for everything that moved.
- What Won't Convert - easy - Some values become numbers. The rest become nothing.
- When Hours Collide - medium - Two reservations, one slot. Find every clash.
- When the Hours Touch - medium - Two sessions that overlap are really one. Find the windows a driver was actually online.
- Where the Buck Stops - hard - A pile of reporting lines, no order to them. Somewhere in the bag sits the one with no boss.
- Where the Deltas Settle - medium - Every stretch of the stream tells its own story. Count the ones that settle to your number.
- Where the Line Breaks - easy - Every batch has a last piece. Mark it right.
- Where the Lines Break - easy - Every record hides its fields behind noise. Pull the real ones loose.
- Where They Part - hard - They all start the same way. How far?
- Who Came First - easy - The feed repeats itself. Keep each member only the first time it speaks.
- Who Gets In - medium - When the roster changes, does access follow?
- Word Counter - easy - Words in, counts out.
- Zip to Record - easy - Two lists become one record.