C++

One of the most fundamental algorithms that appears in interviews at big tech companies is Binary Search. Of course, nobody will ask you to implement binary search directly. However, as Jon Bentley cited in his famous book Programming Pearls, only a small percentage of people he asked—10% to be precise—were able to code this algorithm without any errors.

Here, I will show you a correct implementation of binary search, its variants that appear in interviews, and LeetCode problems that you can solve using these techniques.

In this post, I will explain in detail how I used the builder design pattern together with the bit mask field technique to reduce complexity. As a result, I decreased the cyclomatic complexity from 24 to 0 and reduced development time from hours to minutes.

The rest of this post is organized as follows sections:

• The problem explains the problem I was solving.
• Creating the bit mask field presents a solution to the problem.
• Cyclomatic Complexity discusses cyclomatic complexity and calculates this metric for the solution presented in the section above.
• Builder design pattern explains the builder design pattern and describes the refactoring process that removed complexity.
• Conclusion summarizes this post.
• References provides references related to the topics discussed here.

All the examples shown here are in C++.