Start here

Sound familiar?

1. You watch the tutorial. It makes sense.
2. You open a problem on your own.
3. Your mind goes blank.

You don't need another tutorial. You need the right hint at the right time.

Two kinds of post

Pattern posts

One idea per slide, always in this order:

Step	What it gives you
Spot it	the clue in the problem statement
Story	an everyday example, no code
Picture	a dry run on a tiny input
Code	a pseudocode template you can reuse
Practice	two problems to solve yourself

Hint ladders

For the hard problems. You solve them; each swipe hands you one more hint.

Step	What it gives you
Story	the problem as a real-life situation
Your turn	stop and try it for 15 minutes
Hint 1	a gentle nudge. Try again.
Hint 2	the key idea. Try again.
Hint 3	almost there. Try once more.
Solution	the walk-through and the code

The map

Ten stages. Each one builds on the last.

1. Foundations
2. Arrays, hashing and maths
3. Recursion, sorting, binary search
4. Matrices, strings, backtracking
5. Linked lists, bits, greedy
6. Stacks and queues
7. Trees and heaps
8. Graphs
9. Dynamic programming
10. Tries, strings and advanced topics

The home page lists every post so far, grouped by stage, and Patterns lists them by pattern.

Use it like this

1. Save the post. You will want it again when you revise.
2. Solve on paper first. Trace the tiny example by hand, then code.
3. Ask AI for hints, not answers. Paste this into any AI chat:

Give me one hint for LeetCode 1. Don't show the solution unless I ask.

What the blog adds

The slides use pseudocode, so they work whatever language you write. Every post page here also has the explanation, the pseudocode, tested code in Java, Python, C++ and JavaScript with a copy button, and the practice problems as links.

Next: 01 · Eight data structures, the structures every pattern is built on.