LC
yo guys I've a quick question I'm a senior college student and I figured I should start doing leet codes before I graduate so that when I do I'm ready for interviews. I've done a little bit of leet code in my freshmen year but since then I've been heavy on web development in general using typescript. is leetcode still a thing? is it worth my time? if so should I start practicing it in typescript or learn master another language to practice it with (I already know a little bit of go but not much of it's standard library)
3 Replies
it never hurts to learn more, that's the defining characteristic of this industry. leetcode is fine but you should be building things with the knowledge you gain from it.
if you're not confident in your knowledge of algorithms then you might wanna hit the problems
you'll have to do some self reflection and decide for yourself
at the end of the day, you need to be a competent problem solver regardless
I'm confident in my abilities to solve real problems when it comes to web dev but when it comes to popular algorithms / data structures yeah I know them and I can solve a few leet codes (I might have to look up some things to remember) but I'm not good at it because I don't practice them often
frankly the only data structures I use everyday are sets, hashmaps and arrays lol
i guess another way to put it is, you should also be comfortable with the fundamentals of important data structures/design patterns
example: at my job, i needed to add a new API endpoint that queried our LDAP service, and the operation was extremely expensive
my naive implementation took 3 minutes to complete, so i had to revise it
eventually i recognized that i could implement some parts of BFS to traverse all the data i had, and brought it down to around 3 seconds
but i didn't implement BFS verbatim, i had to modify it to satisfy the problem constraints
point is, it's fine to use the tools/classes/libraries offered by your lang, but understand how they work
that will enable you to see the problems you solve in new perspectives