Fuse Energy·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen
Jun 2026
Fuse Energy had me build a mini spreadsheet engine from scratch, SET/GET/SUM operations, dependency tracking, cycle detection and all. Pretty meaty for a single coding round and the cycle handling piece is where I think most people would trip up.
- Design and implement an in-memory spreadsheet supporting SET, GET, and SUM operations, where SUM can reference individual cells or rectangular ranges, and values update dynamically when dependencies change.
- How do you detect and handle cyclic dependencies in the spreadsheet formula graph, for example if A1 depends on B1 and then B1 is set to depend on A1?
“This is a bigger problem than it looks at first glance.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at Fuse Energy, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.
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