I started doing Leetcode a little seriously since December 2019.
When I started I felt the EASY questions to be difficult for me. It took me a while to solve Easy questions. During that stage even the medium problems were way out of my league.
I liked leetcode for the quality of questions and the community. Unlike other platforms, the questions were not too verbose, they were to the point.
In my journey so far, I had a buddy who will help me understand some solutions, that way the journey was made easier.
Some useful links that I had collected
DP Patterns
Sliding window
Backtrack
Learnings
- Watch out for the constraints, they tell you if the expectation is O(N), O(N^2), or lograthmic.
- Think of the naive approach first and develop from there.
- For LinkedList problems, learnt about the dummy node to ease the corner case.
- Think Tree - Think Recursive
- Stack and recursion are interchangble at most cases.
- For DP - Draw the recursive tree, helps to identify the recurrance relation.
Leetcode has been a good go to site for me this year.
Mistakes that I still do, which I would want to rectify :
- Checkout discussions for solutions too quick.
- Not thinking in structured way for a problem.
- Missing edge cases.
- Not being much confident about opening hard problems.
- On contests settling on the comfort zone for 2 question solve or 3 rarely.
Just recording the progress so far (self reference) it will be of help to look back later.
