Daily Prep - Thursday, 2026-05-21

Today’s Targets Completed

DSA - 4 Problems

System Design - 1 Topic


End Of Day Reflection

  • Smashed the rest of the Sliding Window pattern! Minimum Window Substring was a tough Hard problem, but the key insight of storing indices instead of slicing substrings every time saved significant overhead.
  • Learned to optimize character frequency maps (reducing time from O(26*n) to O(n)).
  • Tackled the gaming distraction from yesterday with a strict, non-negotiable hard stop today. Back on track.

Next Day Goal

  • Tackle the backlog notes for LinkedList cycle detection.
  • Start the next DSA pattern (e.g., Two Pointers / Heap or review Tree DFS/BFS).