A quiet Friday spent rebuilding system design from scratch and learning DSA by pattern, not by volume.
Day 5 was a relatively quiet day. It was Friday, and there weren't many recruiter calls, so I used the time to focus on preparation—particularly system design and DSA.
System design is something I'm revisiting almost from scratch. After around four and a half years in the industry, the individual concepts aren't completely new to me. The challenge is putting everything together, understanding where each piece fits, and being able to explain it clearly during an interview.
I'm trying to build a process around that.
I'll pick a topic, understand it properly, go through different explanations and resources, and once I feel confident, use a mock interview to test whether I can actually explain it. One thing that makes this easier today is AI—I can use ChatGPT as an interviewer, practice speaking through a design, and even go deeper into areas where I'm stuck.
For DSA, I'm taking a slightly different approach.
Instead of trying to solve hundreds of questions, I'm focusing on patterns. I'll take a question, identify the underlying pattern, and then use AI to find other questions that follow the same pattern. Once I understand the pattern, I try to mentally work through similar problems before actually writing the code.
The goal is to optimize my preparation workflow—not just spend more hours studying.
I want to be able to look at a problem, recognize the pattern, understand the approach, and explain it within a short period of time. Interviews themselves are time-constrained, so preparation needs to reflect that reality.
I'm still figuring out whether this approach will work.
But that's becoming one of the themes of this journey: experiment, learn, adjust, and keep moving.
Day 5 was mostly about improving the way I prepare rather than simply increasing the amount of preparation.
The weekend is coming up, and the plan is to spend some time on projects and continue building momentum.
Five days down. Two more to complete the first week.
Comments