Sami's.
2 min read

Six weeks of DSA, from absolute zero

#dsa#algorithms#interviews#learning

For about six weeks I’ve been grinding data structures and algorithms. It’s on pause at the moment, so this feels like a good time to write down where I got to. Partly as a checkpoint for myself, partly in case it’s useful to anyone else starting from the same place I did.

Why I’m putting myself through this

My degree requires an international internship, and I need to land one to graduate in 2027. International roles mean technical interviews, and technical interviews mean DSA. So the goal is pretty concrete: walk into those interviews and not completely freeze.

Quick bit of honesty about the starting line. I came in at zero. Not rusty, not “I did this years ago.” Actually zero. Coming from economics and management, this was brand new territory for me, and the first week was humbling.

What I’ve covered so far

Six weeks in, here’s the ground I’ve gone over:

  • Arrays and strings, the foundation everything else sits on
  • Stacks and queues
  • Two pointers
  • Sliding window
  • Binary search
  • Trees
  • Graphs

Going from knowing nothing to actually reasoning about graph traversals in six weeks feels like real progress, even though I know there’s a mountain left. Dynamic programming, heaps, backtracking, and a whole lot more pattern practice are all still ahead of me.

Why it’s paused, and what comes next

School and the apprenticeship needed my full attention for a stretch, so the grind is parked, not abandoned. When I pick it back up, the plan shifts from learning new topics to pure volume. Drilling problems until the patterns become reflex instead of something I have to rebuild from scratch every single time.

I’ll post updates here as I go, including the stuff I get wrong, because that’s usually where the real learning hides.