I Solved 1583 Leetcode Questions Here's What I Learned 

The biggest problem with pen and paper or whiteboards is that I need to actually remember the legacy skill of handwriting.

I feel it's a shame that people now think, I need to get better at programming, and they don't write some cool programs to become better but they will do leetcode problems for countless hours.

Wow, start with easy problems and then increase difficulty. This is really next level advice. Life changing

I would like to see prime doing a leetcode contest. it will be interesting to see how he approaches problems.

One really nice thing about leetcode problems is that you can jump into one and finish it with very little warmup. On the flipside, if I'm working on a project, I need more time to get into a flow state in order to be productive. I can just crank out leetcodes because they are self-contained problems.

I stopped leetcode and started focusing 100% on building projects. Leetcode is good but I think starting out building things is completely diff

I use leetcode for de-dusting my skills on a language. If I haven't used a given language for over 3-4 years, a dozen problems on all difficulties is more than enough to refresh for interviews.

I think in companies, it is more about understanding frameworks, storage solutions, networking. the maximum what I had was if I understand the complexity O-Notation of a given problem.

Most of coding don't really need any complicated algorithm problems.. In my experience, it was way, way more important to know OS, networking, compiler, PL well. And people who knows these well can always pickup required algorithm and data structure knowledge when needed.

There is a reason why he is very much into Leetcode, coz in India interview process is fucked up like anything, College Gard has to go through 4-6 rounds on interview in order to get internship at good product based company, hence he was compelled to do that much of programming, I don't blame him, on top that the job market is way more competitive in India.

As a junior/mid I'm on stackoverflow all the time. It usually points me in a good direction towards solving the problem I have at that moment... but I've never experienced situation where I was able to copy/paste some portion of the code that would just work. I suppose it's funny as a meme but I don't find it as a realistic situation.

im with the same employer for years, however i at least go to an interview 1-2 a year. its also good to get in touch with reality sometimes :)

I will say it's not easy solving algos .. with experience and taking the time to learn the underlying concepts of the different algos you'll see. Solving algos becomes second nature because it intuitively makes sense to you what you're trying to do.

"Apply to companies you don't care about." may not always be a good approach because not all companies have the same interview process. I have never in my life had a whiteboard interview so no matter how many interviews in smaller companies I did, I would never get anything near passing the big tech interview.

I use stackoverflow not just as a quick reference but because it helps check if there's a new way of doing something.

As a senior, I can guarantee you even you understand DSA fundamentals very well, you would easily fail at LeetCode questions, you just have to come back to LeetCode again and again. The problem is LeetCode skills don't stick.

Bro I really liked your idea about applying and practice. The greatest advices ever for gaining confidence, thanks sooo much

Prime explaining his notes brought back my interest in discrete maths lmao thanks

Solving leetcode or algoexpert problems is fun and challenging and will make you a better PROGRAMMER for sure, but does nothing for your DEVELOPER career imho. Being a good, professional developer is so much more than being able to sort a list or create a linked list or whatever. It's design patterns, using frameworks, working in a team, using GIT or some other source control system, etc. etc.

I have solved one leetcode problem so far. I want to solve about 10-20 but only because I want to see if I can do that in BASIC since I don't think anyone else does it. I kind of like many of the problems, in the same way I like solving crossword puzzles on the beach. Anyway, I think Rosetta code is more interesting though not quite equivalent.

Loved your course on frontend masters, it helped me a lot .

A flaw to the advice of applying at companies you dont care about to practice coding interviews is you assume we can even get an interview in the first place

The important thing is: you need to be doing it regularly. In the past I also cracked several medium, hard problems, but then, as I never looked to them again, I just forgot about them. So if you are not doing it on a regular basis, your mind will erase it. Unless you are gifted by the universe with a freaking good memory (not my case at all).

If you have five interviews and two of them are coding, you might spend some time on other topics besides leetcode - design, project management, leadership, quality assurance, etc.

Dude but doing coding puzzles is honestly so much fun. You have to warp your brain half way to Tuesday to solve some of these problems. And it's so so so satisfying to solve them. It would be fun to have a job where you just make problems.

Ngl the interviewers in india for amazon google and meta asked me real hard questions for dsa almost like they wanted me to fail. I joined meta in london and the interview was much easier especially the dsa bit, also interviewers were more friendly and actually felt like they wanted me to join. I donno if this is universal or just something I felt.

today I learned that I am a loser.

Random indian guy: i solved 9999 leet code questions but i gonna shitcode in production. enjoy

After 20 years, I can count how many times I've had to write a red-black tree in real life on 0 hands. If you have to implement this stuff yourself then you're doing something wrong.

My biggest problem with leetcode is that I can never understand the problem! Whoever writes the descriptions for the problems doesn't write them nearly stupid enough for me to understand. It's a skill issue; if I knew what the answer was, I'd understand the question, but I'm still going to complain about it.

I've done all of the problems on leetcode. I just find it a fun thing to do when I'm watching a movie or waiting for something. Look, it's either sudoku or leetcode.

Bro where os your 9hr long algo course link i am not able to find it.

In our undergraduate studies in France, we have whiteboard sessions when a teacher asked us to solve stuff and roast us when we fail. Then grade us on the perf. You hear stuff like "why are you even here", "in one semester you are out for sure", "this is high school level math, and you still got it wrong". We were going in this hour of joy in group of 3 students and while you were solving your problem in one whiteboard in the corner of the room, you mate was being roosted by the professor. My favorite time was when my friend was done with the theory question and explain everything to the professor and the latter replied: "good, now you are going to demonstrate to me why what you just said is wrong". Don't miss it but if coding interviews are like that as well, the trick is to take it with a smile and don't pressure yourself too much, show confidence even if you are not sure how to solve and always try something

The only time I've copy pasted from SO directly and it just worked was for this problem: the percentage of overlap between rectangle A and B, given that rectangle A is always bigger, and all we have is their bounding box coordinates. Someone happened to have the same exact question and there was a super elegant function that accepted two objects as arguments with the same name for keys. It felt like cheating and it has never happened again lol

Look whatever he said fits in indian scenario. I hope is just casual roast. To crack big MNC in india you need to be an expert/cm on codeforces specially in current market scenario as a fresh college grad

I wish I could get that many interviews like he mentions in the beginning, I don't even get that many so that adds extra stress to the few that I do get, which have been very very few so far.

So I'm fairly new to all of this. Still working through a webdev bootcamp. I'm dabbling with Python as well, and plan on going back to College for some Computer Science courses. Any recommendations for a newbie?

While i like stuff like leetcode and codinggame and etc, i feel like most times it ends up pushing people into "small domain" mindsets. Which is fine for "find the shortest path from x to y". But at some point I'll need you to "extend large domain x with new feature z. x is already a s**tshow of a system, how would you go about implementing z without making x even more of a s**show?". Now i might need an answer that totally runs counter to "best at the small domain" but is "best at the larger domain". Can the person do that shift if he has focused too tightly on the "small domain" issues? Can he understand that many times, there are tradeoffs? Has he become so familiar with the optimal solution that now he can't see he's trying to fit a square peg into a round hole?

14:00 I find more and more I end up more confused leaving stack overflow than when I went in. A lot of people either marked it solved with "I solved it myself" with no solution, the classic "Duplicate of" and the duplicate doesn't solve the issue, or one question with 20 different solutions which are so different from each other that attempting all of them would waste my time.

Stack overflow is for finding out what the universe of solutions might look like.

It's very rare to see a software engineer RU-vidr like you... Keep it up🙌👏

I found leetcode recently and it's a fun place that will throw out some puzzles. But it hasn't helped me build anything. I can make this one system REALLY efficient and consider how it could be optimized but... That's what you pull out after you've figured out how to build the whole system.

I use stackoverflow monthly. 50% of the time its to answer the question "How do I search the text of all stored procedures in the database" because im trying to figure out everywhere we are referencing a specific column

If it's hard to get to the interview stage (i.e the job market sucks) there are discord communities and online resources for mock interviews!

CS graded uni in 1990 learnt binary search. Retiring next year, never once implemented my own b search. I did see just 6:38 once “a deadly embrace” with db table locks.

I wonder how these people have so much time and how companies consider this a good approach. Do you guys work or do you login to work and then do a new endpoint edit to add a new field to table A on Monday, proceed to ignore the backlog, and open leetcode and do that for the rest of the sprint?

Thank you so much bro for your advice!

i solved 1476 problems on leetcode (Rank 2,270). But there's still type of problem patterns which i find hard to tackle, such as problem 432.

9:27 "get the whiteboard out", did he just suggest.. bringing your own scrum mainer to an interview? CHROOT

How are any of those leetcode exercises help with web stuff, front end, backend, queries, github, app architecture, mobile and so on?

I like how you have to implement binary search tree algorithm on an interview for a job for which you’ll do crud apps. Awesome idea :)

I find your videos funny like everybody else however you got me nervous about knowing stuff that I had no idea about until now.

i programmed on whiteboards - i think its much more common to code on programming apps where I care about variable names etc. On a whiteboard short names matter -- on a whiteboard often youll run out of space and have arrows going all over, it turns into a nightmare to follow really quick if you dont plan your writing space well. I feel whiteboarding is not common now post covid with interviews being online - although i guess copy paste AI answers is going to be a potential problem.

Where is the link to the free 9 hours algorithm course?

I work in big tech and so often I face code that has 0 optimizations, n^2 and even n^3 solutions, or just ugly unmaintainable code. And often I question why do we even ask leetcode on interviews if no one uses it irl.

For simple questions, I suppose it’s better to ask ai than searching anywhere else like stackoverflow. In 99 of 100 cases it perfectly gives you a simple example and brief explanation that’s enough to proceed further on your own. Another option is to look at docs, but sometimes it just takes a bit more time to find what you need than ask ai.

Good day, I cant find the link to the algorithm course you mentioned.

The only problem with doing interviews at places you don’t want to work at just for practice is that you will waste time of other people. Hopefully they will also train together with you to conduct them even better next time so maybe not complete waste, but they won’t get anything else they are hoping for unless you discover that it’s actually a decent place 😕

where the course ? i am trying to learn algos cause its about time before i just keep doing projects. since i am too young to get hired i do projects since its fun and entertaining and in the short term programming is a hobby not a job for me.

Learn as I go is my approach here, reading a book about algorithms before even starting LeetCode is a good way to become demotivated

Wait, isn't knowing FizzBuzz enough?!

where is the link to the free algorithms course??

Where and how do you regularly study algorithms?

Being an Indian I can see where this rat race is coming from, here we are nurtured as bookworms and for all sorts of tests. So most of em fall into this trap instead of finding their own path, which in turn is the much easier option!

Signed up for the Frontend Masters Bootcamp, but don't see any free algorithms course. Please share it, ya know - between diaper changes :P

Where’s the link to the dsa course?

Algorithm questions for interviews are stupid. The correct answer for each one is do a search for the best algorithm then 1) use the version in your available standard libraries, 2) pull in a dependency that’s been tested and trusted by the community, or 3) implement it yourself but make sure to have proper test coverage to make sure you didn’t screw up. And typically if you have to get to number 3 the platform your are working on is not very mature so because for “there be dragons”.

No link in the description :[

He did not put it in the description, no one is suprised.

I have finally written a linked list in Rust. I have a clone, and a map, and as ref... so not clean. But I am far from sure how clean it could even be. I'm going to redo the DS and Algo first 13 chapters (through red black tree), now in Rust instead of python... (which that was cheating). Oof will be hard, but I will learn a lot

Hey man where's the algo free course link?

He's got some crazy screen tearing. Is it only on the stream or also on his monitor

the IRONY, my guy talking about DSA and then reprints everything from the start @4:30

Where is the link for algorithm course he is talking about?

I have been a programmer officially for 2 years, and been writing code for 10. Never had to use any of these algo’s and I can’t complete any leetcode problems. Maybe it’s different just writing code for networks..

is this a re-upload? i was searching for this yesterday and I didn't find it WTH??

I'd add to use a language that has a lot of shorthand built in so you can code faster. Like Python and their list comprehension. Nice to be able to transpose a matrix in one line of code.

Does anyone actually implement dynamic programming, binary search, or advanced concepts at their work?

Your DSA course is on fire holy moly!

It is similar to working in higher level languages making you better at programming in lower level languages. Knowing about leet techniques can make your normal code better.

Who has the link for the 9.5 hour algo course? I don't see it in the description

you're good and crazy bruhh!

where is the link WHERE IS THE LINK???? the free course is on frontendmasters i think

> "I kinda know where I'm good at, and I kinda know where I'm bad at" > Camera fucking dies OMG THE TIMING WAS JUST THE BEST

Good advice dude

This ain't hentai over here. This is programming" - TheDPrimeagen

I’m not certain, but logically I see how leetcode can help point out gaps in your knowledge, but once you find those gaps i think it’s important to go out and make something that forces you to get better at whatever it was you were lacking in order to solve that problem. Leetcode can show you what you might need to learn, but in order to learn it you need to build stuff

I blanked on a binary search on an array for a doordash interview last month it was so embarassing. best believe i remember it now

He in fact did not add the course to the description

this guy is hilarious lmao first funny programmer channel i've seen

@ThePrimeTime where's that free algorythms course? Not in the description :)

Is this the guy that works at that Netflix startup™?

Where are all the interviews to practice on right now if you have less than 2 years experience? Crickets crickets. That is good advice for 3 years ago.

People should read introduction to algorithms, its a great book and gives you the mathematical foundation for how they work

Where can I find the link to the free algorithm course mentioned in 6.32? Thank you in advance

the bro culture is still in tech, just look at what most tech youtuber is talking about when they look in an interview.

"Before jumping into leetcode to get good at interview questions, make sure you actually have taken a class or two on coding or finish your degree". I'd hypothesize that actually sitting there in the interview thinking about the questions does slightly more than just solving leetcode problems. Not that you wouldn't encounter similar basic tests of your understanding, but just completing coding problems is different from what many interviewers want. I don't think they want just a guy who can solve their problem, they want a guy who demonstrates their process, the how and why and is good at explaining what they're doing and why. The why. That's where you really get tripped up about your knowledge, you might be technically breezing through problems, but it might just be that you don't know what you're doing and why. The employer usually wants you to know what you're doing when you do it even if you can't solve all the problems right away. And like I believe the big O questions are popular just because it demonstrates your understanding of what the impacts of your solutions are. I love the pen and paper point. For some reason (maybe obvious reasons) university notes and recommendations have moved from paper to virtual and I think it shows with my classmates. People don't necessarily write the notes anymore because the pdf is there, or when solving they don't start from the basics like understanding the situation and making a note on what they need to solve and what they need for solving it. They don't construct a plan (I'll admit I used to be really bad at that too and still am often too lazy, but I've reached a point where I know the subjects well enough to follow the intuition without getting tripped) or revisit theory/examples behind the topic if they're not sure how the phenomenon works. And I think it's a similar problem with the technical ability in coding interviews vs getting asked the tough questions like "have you thought about what you're doing?" I've recently started to check out a bit of design methodologies in manufacturing and trying to read the instructions through and framing the problem before attacking it. Just to not do mindless unnecessary work and get to the goal in a more coherent way. The biggest threat to that is if you can just about keep all the related concepts in your head about the problem so you won't make notes about a plan and then you forget something or get confused. And personally I'm really bad at evaluating my results before calling it done. I can often afterwards reason about them successfully to at least gauge how realistic it is, but throw it off the table as soon as I reach the answer. And that should be a priority skill. Definitely useful advice on this video if you apply them with thought, not all are relevant to just you, but plenty of good things just for having a structured process of learning. Which is the most difficult thing to have if optional, being organised.

Being good at leetcode tends to lead to shock and awe when the leetcode pro comes in on day one and is trying to work through legacy code with zero documentation. Best interview I ever had was a company that gave me a sample app where I had to 1: get 3 failing tests to pass 2: add a feature 3: suggest ways to make the app more efficient This is a much better approach that is more realistic for what you are going to do in your day to day. And the final suggestion piece can weed out those that cannot communicate well. Done.

never seen prime so upset when someone mentioned copy-pasting from stackoverflow

What is the link to the free algorithms course mentioned 6:34 ?