Very nice write-up, I can just feel the stress. Regarding the interview, there's this trick I learned that presenters do when they come on the stage. Instead o

Very nice write-up, I can just feel the stress. Regarding the interview, there's this trick I learned that presenters do when they come on the stage. Instead of focusing on the audience and their talk immediately, they first drink a glass of water slowly. It lets you set your own pace, and deal with the first high of adrenaline a little. In this case, they asked you a question and you immediately fired up a repl and started typing away as if it's a race. But if no one is holding a stop watch it's not really a race. If you're going to have to do this kind of interview more often, perhaps practice on your generic problem solving strategy. If it were me, I'd probably ask for a piece of paper, and then write down the components of problem on the highest level, then drill down the details of each component. At each level of detail check with the interviewer if the requirements of the component match their intentions. When you're confident you've got the algorithm down on paper, then you can start on working it out in the REPL. Also, I'm not a LISPy guy so no idea how you usually do this, but those first three mistakes you made were horrible. Obviously you were nervous, but these kinds of mistakes don't happen if you have a good IDE and disciplined code style. You can't miss matching brackets if every opening bracket starts a new line and a new indentation level. You can always clean up the new lines when your algorithm is done. Practice and preparation are the best countermeasure to stress. Not that I agree with this interview style at all by the way. You are most likely an excellent developer, and if they don't decide on hiring you they probably are making a big mistake. If I was hiring Clojure people I'd be surprised I'd get someone that would work a REPL like that without internet reference at all.