And even if it didn’t help my chances directly like that, even getting a small chuckle would help me be more comfortable and confident.

When I’m doing coding interviews I always like to start off and say I’m a big fan of very long variable names. “As descriptive as you can be” I say. Then I get to my first for loop. Instead of i I use “iterator” and then when I start a nested loop I use “jiterator” and it always gets a laugh.