Nutanix Coding Interview: Graphs and Search

Graphs are the single most common family in the Nutanix algorithm battery, and grids and rotated arrays sit right behind. Four problems come up again and again across reported loops, and this lesson works all four as runnable code. Spread rot through a grid one minute at a time. Count the separate landmasses in a map of ones and zeros. Turn a set of prerequisites into a valid build order, and refuse the ones that contain a loop. Find a value in a sorted array that has been rotated at some unknown pivot.

The Nutanix angle

None of these four wears a storage costume. Nutanix asks them as the standard problems they are. The DS&A round here looks like a strong software-engineering interview anywhere, and graphs lead the pack. So the preparation is plain: know the two grid traversals cold, breadth-first when the answer counts layers, depth-first when it only counts components. Know that a dependency order is a topological sort, and that the cycle case returns nothing at all, not even a partial order. Know the one comparison that makes binary search survive a rotation. The round rewards code that runs on the first awkward input the interviewer throws, so each problem below is worked to a solution that handles the empty grid, the single cell, and the missing target.

What's inside

4 problems, worked step by step
about 38 min

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