Vivek's Blog

Three months of "practicing" and you can still only confidently solve the problems you've already solved. Here's the loop, exactly as it happens and the way out of it.

A field guide for anyone whose LeetCode stats say "200 solved" and whose confidence says otherwise.

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   Open LeetCode  →  Filter: Easy  →  Solve one you've already done
        ▲                                                  │
        │                                                  ▼
   Close the laptop  ←  Feel productive (10 min)  ←─────────┘

              ↻  same time tomorrow

If this looks like your study log, keep reading.

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The loop, exactly as it happens

Sunday night. You open LeetCode because you "should grind today." You filter by Easy, sort by acceptance rate, and knock out Two Sum, Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock, and Contains Duplicate in twenty minutes flat. You close the tab feeling productive.

Next weekend: same filter, same sort, occasionally a "new" easy problem that turns out to be structurally identical to three you've already done. Three months later, your profile says 180 problems solved and in an actual interview you freeze on a medium-difficulty tree question, because you've never really left the array aisle.

180 solved problems and one topic mastered isn't progress. It's a very long warm-up.

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Why the loop feels so safe

• Arrays are first on every list, so they're the default starting point and nobody ever tells you when it's time to leave.
• Easy problems give a quick hit of "I'm good at this." Medium problems make you feel stuck for twenty-five minutes before anything clicks so your brain quietly routes around them.
• Without a plan that says "this is next," there is no next. You default to whatever's comfortable, every single time.

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What it's actually costing you

Real interviews are graph- and DP-heavy at any company worth applying to. Arrays and strings are the floor of DSA, not the ceiling they're where the questions stop being a filter and start being a formality.

If you can solve every easy array problem half-asleep but freeze the moment a graph or tree shows up, that's not a knowledge gap. It's a coverage gap. And coverage gaps don't show up on your "problems solved" counter they show up in the interview room.

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Why most "complete" DSA sheets don't fix this

• Most sheets are a flat list of 400+ problems with no real sense of order so people default to sorting by difficulty, and end up right back in the loop.
• The few with a sequence often throw you straight into mediums and hards the moment a new topic starts. You bounce off, and retreat to the one topic that still feels safe: arrays.
• Almost none of them go past trees, graphs, and DP into the stuff that's actually rare segment trees, articulation points, KMP, digit DP. The exact topics that separate "did a lot of LeetCode" from "is actually strong at this."

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What's different about the roadmap below

It's built to make the loop structurally impossible. Every topic is ordered easy → medium → hard, so you always get a foothold before the difficulty ramps no topic ever throws you in the deep end on day one.

8 phases · 25 topic nodes · 267 problems, linked & ready · 4 advanced nodes most sheets skip

• A path that moves forward on purpose - foundations → core structures → recursion → trees & heaps → graphs → greedy → DP → advanced - so you're never guessing what's next.
• A dedicated Advanced branch: segment trees & Fenwick trees, SCC / bridges / articulation points, KMP / Z-function / Manacher, digit DP and combinatorics.
• Progress that's tracked and saved automatically, so you can watch - in actual numbers - yourself leaving arrays behind.

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How to actually use it

• Don't skip a topic at 70% completion just because the next one looks shinier. The mediums you avoid are the ones that show up in interviews.
• For every topic, aim for at least two mediums per easy. Easy tells you the pattern exists; medium tells you whether you can actually apply it.
• If a topic only took you a day, you probably under-practiced it. Come back in two weeks and redo three problems cold no looking at your old solution.
• Use search instead of the difficulty filter to jump around. That filter is exactly how you ended up back at arrays last time.

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Break the loop

The full roadmap is one click away, 8 phases, 25 topics, 267 problems, ordered so you actually move forward, including the advanced topics nobody else covers.

→ Open the DSA Roadmap

⬇ Download the Roadmap from the button in the file (HTML, works offline)

Your progress saves automatically so that you can pick up exactly where you left off.

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See you on the other side of arrays.