When I first started considering honing my Algorithms skills, I could not find the right site. Geeksforgeeks was the first place I started. I'm from India and Leetcode is almost unheard of here or at least no one around me was using it. I tried my hand at sites like CodeChef and CodeForces but they were just too intimidating.

I then proceeded to Hackerrank which was founded by an alumni of my college so I was naturally inclined to try it out. While the inerface is good, there are way too many subcategories and one does not really know how or where to begin. Mind you, all the while I was no close to developing my skills. I finally chanced upon LeetCode. Even here I was losing hope. I started going through the problems that were easy but it took some time getting adjusted to the editor and the various errors. LeetCode sure does excel in making one think about every possible corner case. The UI captured the fine line between a good design and at the same time not being intimidating.

After some time I could not find any more easy questions to solve. I was stuck. I was too proud to see the solution. Even the remaining easy questions were intimidating. So I gave up. I thought I was a hopeless cause. This was a few months before companies started coming to my campus to recruit interns. I again gave it a shot and only did the questions I could do without help. I ran as far away as I could from Graphs, Trees and Dynamic Programming which are of course the most important topics. I had essentially only put to use what I knew and did not gain an iota of skill from LeetCode. With only a month away from companies coming, I finally decided to do a couple of Tree questions. I forced myself to see the answer and code it up. I had to accept that I could not possibly know everything. Once I saw the answers to a couple of questions, I went back and solved many of the questions I had not previously solved. Even now, I try as much as possible to avoid looking at the answers, and sometimes even try a question for days before I look at the answer or I just let it go which is not a good thing to do.

I've only solved almost all of the easy questions so far and a few of medium as well. This in itself made me learn a lot. I realised that once in a while, it is okay to look at the answers and let your pride take a hit.