How to Prepare for a Tech Interview

What interviewers are really checking

Beyond knowledge, interviewers watch how you approach the unknown: do you clarify, think aloud, test your ideas, and stay calm when stuck? A candidate who reasons clearly about a half-solved problem often beats one who silently memorised answers. Preparation means practising all three: knowledge, thinking, and explaining.

Prepare your projects — they will be the centre

For every project on your resume, be ready to answer: What does it do? Why did you build it? What was the hardest bug and how did you find it? What would you improve now? Practise two-minute spoken summaries out loud — if you cannot explain it simply, you do not own it yet, whatever the code says.

Technical preparation, by track

• All tracks — fundamentals of your main language, how the internet works, Git basics, your OS and data structure basics
• Web — HTML/CSS layout, JavaScript DOM and events, what happens when a page loads
• Security — networking basics, common attacks (phishing, malware), and ethics: when is testing legal?
• AI/data — ML vocabulary, how models train, verifying AI output, basic data handling

Use the lessons in this library as your revision list — each one ends with the key points interviewers love to ask about.

Answering questions you do not know

Say what you do know, reason from it, and be honest about the boundary: “I have not used that in a project yet, but my understanding is…” Never invent. Interviewers are experts at detecting bluffing, and honesty plus reasoning is a genuinely respected combination.

The questions you ask back

An interview is two-way. Smart questions: What would I work on in the first three months? How does the team review code or handle incidents? What do interns or juniors who succeed here do differently? These show seriousness — and give you real information about the job.

Practice task (this week)

Run a mock interview with a friend: 10 minutes of project questions, 10 minutes of fundamentals from your track, 5 minutes of your questions to them. Record it on your phone, listen once, and fix the two weakest answers. Repeat monthly — calm is a trained skill.