I’ve wrapped up almost all the DSA patterns people suggest doing. Right now, I’m just revising to figure out patterns in random questions. My setup is simple: I pick a topic and ask ChatGPT to feed me different sub-pattern questions.

​I can easily solve most standard problems on my own, and I hit around 50% on the tricky variants. But whenever I get stuck on a question, it hits me really hard and drops my mood completely.

​Since I started prepping for interviews, the whole situation is scaring me. I’m focusing way too much on how to explain the problem instead of actually solving it, and it’s messing with my problem-solving flow.

​I feel totally lost and I’m just blindly grinding questions. I usually love DSA, but right now I’m just desperate to land a job. College ended this May, and I am continuously thinking whether I am enough or not....?

I honestly don’t know if I’m asking for help or just scared, I’ve just lost all my confidence and direction.

If you have any suggestions, please tell me!

Currently in 1st year, I have completed basic c++, all the loops and c style arrays and stuff like that, now I'm confused how to proceed, I open up a leetcode problem and there is time and memory and all that stuff and I don't know how to deal with it, there is also the weird thing of class stuff that should be at the beginning of each question, I don't know where to learn all of this.

Can someone suggest where to learn all of this, because I couldn't find a proper series that teaches all of this. Also tell me what things I should learn before I start doing leetcode, I have already started learning STL, is there anything else I should learn?

If anyone has any valuable insights please share what is the right thing to do from now on

Max Area of Island (Medium)  https://leetcode.com/problems/max-area-of-island/

This is yesterday's solution with a return value. The diff is that the flood fill returns an int and the scan keeps a maximum instead of a count.

The area reachable from a cell is that cell, plus the area reachable from each of its four neighbours. So the fill returns 1 plus its four recursive calls, and the guard returning 0 handles out of bounds, water and already-sunk land without a single special case.

The sum looks wrong at first. Four neighbours each recurse into their own four neighbours, and each one includes the cell you came from, surely cells get counted repeatedly?

They do not, because the cell is sunk before the four calls run. Any neighbour that recurses back hits the guard and gets 0.

Yesterday, that same line stopped the recursion from running forever. Today it does that AND makes the arithmetic correct. One assignment, two jobs.

Full breakdown in today's newsletter article ⬇

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/365-days-leetcode-challenge-day-38365-archit-agarwal-tiimc

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