Grinding leetcode, these problems aren't getting easier or more intuitive, how should I change my approach?
Been grinding leetcode for the last 2.5 months, where I study 1-2 hours a day every day. Have only completed 60 so far (36 easy 17 medium) + 7 on Grokking. The reason it's so little is because I would spend a week on each topic trying to understand what it even is via YouTube videos before attempting related/topic tagged questions.
From a conceptual standpoint, most of these topics make perfect sense. Graphs and trees make sense as does bfs/dfs through recursion on them. LinkedLists also make sense, with their next pointer. Dictionaries with their key/val. Binary search with the midpoint, low, high. Sliding window for subarrays. Lists/Arrays I've know for years as have most developers. And so on.
Problem is that although I understand these concepts I still fail at solving most of these problems. The applications of these concepts is always so varied and it almost seems like there are tricks to most of these problems that are unique. Most of the 60 that I 'solved' I would look at the question and often have no idea where to even begin. Sometimes I would make an attempt and fail miserably. Rarely would I be able to solve it, and I can count on hands how many would run on first try (rarely optimally). In the cases where I can't solve I end up looking at the solution in the discussion, sometimes understand it and if not then watch YouTube video for that particular problem to understand it. Then implement it. But it seems like I'm just short-term memorizing some trick, and even when I do a 'related' problem I do not know how to solve it since 'related' is often not so related. Also I'm not sure if the solutions I'm implementing after looking are sticking in memory. Am I going about studying wrong? What would you recommend I do differently? Should I change my approach? #leetcode #interview #studying #software
TC: 120k
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