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178 points henwfan | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.622s | source

I built AlgoDrill because I kept grinding LeetCode, thinking I knew the pattern, and then completely blanking when I had to implement it from scratch a few weeks later.

AlgoDrill turns NeetCode 150 and more into pattern-based drills: you rebuild the solution line by line with active recall, get first principles editorials that explain why each step exists, and everything is tagged by patterns like sliding window, two pointers, and DP so you can hammer the ones you keep forgetting. The goal is simple: turn familiar patterns into code you can write quickly and confidently in a real interview.

https://algodrill.io

Would love feedback on whether this drill-style approach feels like a real upgrade over just solving problems once, and what’s most confusing or missing when you first land on the site.

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michaelmior ◴[] No.46205300[source]
What threw me off is the expectation that I use the same variable names and exact same code structure. There are many ways to implement effectively the same thing. I understand that it would be very challenging to implement a way to validate solutions in this way, but memorizing exact fragments of code feels like it's optimizing for the wrong thing.
replies(3): >>46205638 #>>46207243 #>>46207724 #
VBprogrammer ◴[] No.46205638[source]
Some might consider that a kind of commentary on the leet code interview format.
replies(1): >>46206647 #
1. marssaxman ◴[] No.46206647[source]
After hearing people complain about these fearsome "leetcode interviews" for what feels like a decade now, I have to wonder when I am finally going to encounter one. All I get are normal coding problems.
replies(1): >>46207001 #
2. VBprogrammer ◴[] No.46207001[source]
One man's leet code is another man's simple programming question which involves minimal domain knowledge...

I've had candidates describe what I'd loosely call "warm-up" questions as leet code problems. Thing like finding the largest integer in an array or figuring out if a word is a palindrome.

replies(2): >>46208991 #>>46209153 #
3. andoando ◴[] No.46208991[source]
I mean to be fair "figure out a word is a palindrome" is literally one of the first questions on leetcode. #9 https://leetcode.com/problemset/
4. cloverich ◴[] No.46209153[source]
When people say leet code they usually mean problems that are easy once you know the algorithm, and hard to impossible (in an interview) otherwise.

typical examples would be sorting algorithms or graph search problems, and some companies do indeed ask these; some big tech (the ones everyone studies for) may exclusively ask these. Thats imo largely because CS new grads are their primary pipeline.