Stopped counting LeetCode problems, started counting patterns. Best decision of my grind.
For months I chased a number. Got to 200-something solved and still froze on anything I hadn't seen before. Switched to grouping by pattern — sliding window, two pointers, monotonic stack, that sort of thing — and drilling one until it felt boring. I'm at maybe 45 problems now and calmer in interviews than I was at 200. I'd basically been collecting solutions instead of learning to spot the shape of a problem.
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AnonymousAnon Careful not to overcorrect though. I got so pattern-happy I started forcing every problem into a template, and sometimes the plain brute-force answer is what they want you to say first. But yeah, 200 blind reps is a trap.
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AnonymousAnon This is the whole game. Grouping by pattern the way Neetcode lays it out did the same thing for me. Once you can name the pattern in the first two minutes, the coding part is almost mechanical.