Introduction

In this blog post, we'll share the most commonly asked coding interview questions at Instacart. If you don't have months to study for your interviews, you can use AI tools like Chatmagic to generate solutions quickly and efficiently - helping you pass the interviews and get the job offer!

Problem #1: Time Based Key-Value Store

Design a time-based key-value data structure that can store multiple values for the same key at different time stamps and retrieve the key's value at a certain timestamp. Implement the TimeMap class: TimeMap() Initializes the object of the data structure. void set(String key, String value, int timestamp) Stores the key key with the value value at the given time timestamp. String get(String key, int timestamp) Returns a value such that set was called previously, with timestamp_prev <= timestamp. If there are multiple such values, it returns the value associated with the largest timestamp_prev. If there are no values, it returns "". Example 1: Input ["TimeMap", "set", "get", "get", "set", "get", "get"] [[], ["foo", "bar", 1], ["foo", 1], ["foo", 3], ["foo", "bar2", 4], ["foo", 4], ["foo", 5]] Output [null, null, "bar", "bar", null, "bar2", "bar2"] Explanation TimeMap timeMap = new TimeMap(); timeMap.set("foo", "bar", 1); // store the key "foo" and value "bar" along with timestamp = 1. timeMap.get("foo", 1); // return "bar" timeMap.get("foo", 3); // return "bar", since there is no value corresponding to foo at timestamp 3 and timestamp 2, then the only value is at timestamp 1 is "bar". timeMap.set("foo", "bar2", 4); // store the key "foo" and value "bar2" along with timestamp = 4. timeMap.get("foo", 4); // return "bar2" timeMap.get("foo", 5); // return "bar2" Constraints: 1 <= key.length, value.length <= 100 key and value consist of lowercase English letters and digits. 1 <= timestamp <= 107 All the timestamps timestamp of set are strictly increasing. At most 2 * 105 calls will be made to set and get.

Topics: Hash Table, String, Binary Search, Design