Graphs, Grids & Topological Sort

Two of Okta's medium coding rounds live here, and they share one muscle: exploring a graph without visiting anything twice. A grid is a graph whose nodes are cells and whose edges join neighbors; a build order is a graph whose nodes are tasks and whose edges are prerequisites. Learn to walk both cleanly and you cover the topological-sort round and the grid-search round that show up across Okta's onsite loops.

At Okta the packaging is what sets these rounds apart. The topological-sort problem arrives as a real-world dependency-resolution scenario. The interviewer expects you to model the classes first, walk an example by hand, then code a full working solution with the edge cases covered. The grid problem is graded on optimal time and space, so a working DFS that allocates a second visited grid loses points against one that marks the board in place. Both rounds reward the same thing: a clean traversal you can defend line by line.