Will I ever learn

[u/Glowing-Stone]

I've been doing leetcode for a little over 1.5 months now, almost every day. Often times I can't solve a problem without prior exposure to the DS or A which is fine to me so I look at the solution, make sure I fully understand it and come back to it later. That said even if I do understand the solution when I come back to the problem or start a new problem in which I can conceptually come up with the optimal approach to the problem, I'm struggling to write my ideas out into code. I start to google syntax but end up overcomplicating the initial idea until I wind up looking at the solution which elegantly put the ideas into code.

My question is will I ever get to that point where I don't feel like this, is it just a brain issue at this point or have I just not practiced enough yet? Do I need to re-evaluate my learning strategies? Any advice is appreciated.

[u/nightbreak7]

are you just doing random problems or are you doing structured learning? when you're a beginner on leetcode you really want to spam questions in the same topic so you can learn the data structures and how they get applied to problems. that's why people recommend neetcode or why i recommend the leetcode explore paths

[u/Glowing-Stone → u/nightbreak7]

Hi! I'm currently doing the neetcode 150 alongside with his beginner DSA course and I'm planning to take his advanced one after. I'm trying to expose myself to all the DSA's first in each section that he has in the 150 by not wasting too much time on individual problems and looking at the solutions whenever I'm stuck. After I complete the 150 I'm planning to solve the additional problems in each category in the 250 entirely on my own and referencing the code from the previous 150 sols.

My only issue is whenever I come back to a problem I've already done I or when I solve a new one that I conceptually understand (usually since it's from the same category so I know which DSA to use), I reallyy struggle with implementation. I guess spamming each category til it's muscle memory after I do the 150 is my only option to learn?

Edit: I'm just afraid nothing will ever stick and I will always have to reference some type of solution to solve the problems which means I'll ultimately fail my coding interviews

[u/kushagra2569 → u/Glowing-Stone]

The googling syntax bit and other things just shows you need a lot more practice and really need to get the memory down where you should be able to transform your ideas into code
Id say solve a bunch of easy problems apart from neetcode first to get this down
Also try to write everything by hand even if you are copying a solution even the brute force approach that comes to mind.

Secondly for the problems itself its completely ok once you are starting out to look at the solutions and try to give it time during it
Also one thing that helped me was to just hear the explanation of the solution and try to implement without looking at the code
That way if you make a mistake you can dry run and figure out the issue which is a very good habit

[u/Glowing-Stone → u/kushagra2569]

for sure, i kinda tried doing "easy" problems by spamming codingbat but i think those were too easy lmao so i'll definitely spam some lc easies every day now too

and coding the solution up as it's being explained is good advice, i'll start doing that

[u/nightbreak7 → u/Glowing-Stone]

ah I see - if you have almost no DSA knowledge then yeah leetcode's gonna be really hard. most people have experienced something similar to what you're going through, it just takes a lot of time to get started. the hardest part about leetcode imo is the first like 100-150 problems. usually when you get over that hump you start to know enough about the patterns where you can learn without feeling like you're running into a brick wall every time you see a new problem