The question was straightforward, but I wanted to focus on clarity. I started with a recursive approach to serialize, converting the tree into a string representation using pre-order traversal.

The interviewer nodded but seemed more interested in how I would handle the deserialize function. I dove into a level order traversal method for deserialization.

It wasn’t until the end of the interview that I realized I didn’t handle edge cases well, like null nodes during deserialization. This led to some back-and-forth with the interviewer on handling empty trees, which I initially overlooked.

My explanations felt solid, but my execution faltered on the edge cases at crucial points. Overall, I came off as prepared, but I missed some critical details.