I got suggested “just grind leetcode” many times while preparing for my coding interviews, but I was never told how to actually leetcode.
My process was dead ass simple, open a problem set, and solve problems – one by one. Many I solved cause I knew some basics like hash maps, arrays, string manipulation.
But the rest I had no clue. I couldn’t solve them. I was stuck. Even easy problems were not trivial to me. Felt like my mind was in a fog, while thinking on how do I reverse a linked list, or sort it. It must be impossible!
What no one told me was, that I should know the basic theory before hand. Now that I think about it, it must have been obvious, but it wasn’t trivial for me back then.
What I was trying to do, in addition to solving the problems was recreating a lot of CS knowledge that already existed from scratch. And that made all the easy problems hard. And hard one impossible.
In October 2025, a fly bit me, and I decided to just watch a YouTube lecture on what a heap is. I heard this word many times from a younger friend of mine.
And my mind was blown. So you are telling me I can keep track of the minimum element at any moment in time and super quickly also? I don’t have to do a min function over the array every time?! And it’s implemented in the python standard library?
I was so amazed, I had to try it out and I solved all the leetcode problems for the Heap section of the 150 interview questions. It felt GREAT. IT WAS AWESOME.
So I decided to solve leetcode, every day for the whole month. Watch 5 min lectures before hand.
This time though, I had no interview planned, nothing. I just wanted to do it for myself. To learn it. To know it. To understand it. To be aware about, it if I need it.
I was so proud of myself, but I also realized that what was difficult for me wasn’t because I was stupid, but because I didn’t really have the perquisites to do it.
Like, someone said, “luck flavours a prepared mind” and I can’t notice a place where I could use a heap of I don’t know what it is and how to use it.