I'm sorry for the late notice. I'm shutting the group down. I don't have time to properly build the group and I can't justify the expense when none of us are participating. You will retain access to everything but we won't be able to post anything new once the group is archived. If I do decide to attempt to build a swe community in the future I will email you all.

Hey All. Sorry for being silent for the last several weeks. I have had some trouble getting on here since I started my new role. On a related note, since the new role is contract I've continued interviewing elsewhere. I have a full loop with one of the FAANG companies this week. I don't want to say who yet but I will be sharing my notes and other materials I generate while prepping for their System design and DSA interviews.

In the discussions I've had with a few engineers recently I realized that everyone comes to learning data structures and algorithms (DSA) differently. For example, for those of us who are self-taught we have to go out of our want to learn this stuff. If you go to school for CS you likely took a course on them. I have spent thousands of dollars trying to find a shortcut because I didn't want to put the work in. I can tell you that even after buying some of the top courses, books, subscriptions, etc. there is no substitute for putting in the work. However, you can still work smarter so that it won't feel like an endless grind. The way to do that is to identify and learn the common patterns to the solutions to DSA problems. Also, there are some patterns that give you more for your learning time. I've seen extensive lists for DSA patterns. Many of them are really sub-versions of other patterns. Examples include: - Sliding Window pattern is a variation of two pointers, - Backtracking is usually a variation of depth-first search - Breadth-first search is close enough to topological I'll include them There are lots of different lists to consider but I've found the ones from Algo Monster to be good enough. I have their lifetime premium subscription so I don't know how much of the data used to generate these is public so I'm just including the images. There are 12 patterns in the pie chart but that includes "misc." so I can't say how many that represents. There are 12 in the table are the ones I have stuck to for years. If you don't have a premium subscription with them I'll save you a bit of time/money. They did a bunch of analysis on LeetCode data. The data does include some of LC's premium questions. Short version, that analysis is how they concluded the values in the ROI column. The closest thing to a shortcut I've found is to work on learning the patterns in the ROI order.

Just finished the first Momentum Session with @Hari Prakash Vel We had a great chat about his goals and how his job search is going. I gave him a few tips to execute effectively on LinkedIn in 2025. If you haven't read about them, "Momentum Sessions" are a 30 min 1 on 1 call with me. We talk about your current SWE career goals and how you can reach them. If you have reached level 2, check out the "Momentum Session" details course for how you can set up a call.

For years I've thought that cold applying to jobs is demoralizing. It used to work though so I felt that it balanced things out. At the end of 2024 I all but stopped cold applying anywhere because it is a huge waste of time. Since November I've had 2 posts go viral (pictured). Most of this group joined as a result of the 2nd one. The attention from the viral posts isn't the point nor necessary. I bring it up to illustrate that I know what I'm talking about when it comes to getting results from LinkedIn's algorithm. My strategy for job hunting is to get recruiters to reach out to me. I have 3 not so secret, secret tactics to make that happen: 1. Respond quickly to all recruiter outreach (and all DMs in general) 2. Comment daily on 10-20 posts of people with big followings (>10k) 3. Post 3-7 times a week (daily is good, 2x daily is better, I don't count reposting things) These three activities will mark your account as active when recruiters search LinkedIn. They are more likely to reach out to active accounts. You need to do these things for 2-3 weeks to see results but the results are dramatic. If you would like help implementing these things let me know. I have a few tricks to make it easier.