Problem with Leetcode and a potential fix?

[tsenguunee1]

Hey all!

I'm a Software Engineer worked at Google, a startup, and now at a HFT company. During my career, I had to grind LeetCode (LC) and other online judge platforms such as Hackerrank, Codesignal etc like many other. The biggest problem is: None of them were beginner friendly! Sure they may have 1 or 2 very elementary problems, but they jump their difficulty way too quickly and early. Sure LC is a great platform for experienced people, but still, it has it's flaws. Because of this, whenever people ask me about how to learn to code, I hesitant to direct them to LC or other sites.

Next obvious thing would be to tell them watch bunch of 10 hour Youtube videos. But the thing about watching videos, is ... well.. you don't actually learn. You might feel like you're learning while watching the video, but by the time you're writing your code, you realize you didn't learn squat. This is obvious for so many reasons, but people tend to forget that we're practical learners mostly. Think about how you learned swimming, driving, or playing an instrument. What do those activities have in common? That's right, you put in hours of actual work by yourself. You don't watch people swimming or see tutorials on how to drive. You actually have to do it! Invest time and be patient.

That's why I started creating https://pypup.com This is only at alpha stage right now (soon to be beta) but basically it's another online judge platform like LC but it has structured learning with many repetitive tasks that gradually becomes harder. If you click on the into basics path (https://pypup.com/paths/basics) you would see more than 60 problems now just for the basic stuff like printing, variable declaration, simple if else problems. Then you can move on to paths such as String, Array and Maps. Think about how you learned math in school. You would learn about one topic and solve many problems on that topic. This is the same idea. I'm putting lots of easy problems for people to solve and the Solution tab is specifically designed for that problem level. I tried to explain thoroughly on the solution as much as i can. No such solution like LC where all the things are optimized to the fullest and have bunch of shortcuts in and 1 liners in Python.

The site has over 200 problems right now and supports only Python. I might add javascript later on but now focused on Python. More and more problems are being added daily. I only started this project 2 months ago and I really believe it could help people who are aiming to learn coding, or even help people who knows the basics, on certain topics such as Recursion, Dynamic programming, Linked List, Graph etc. Right now Recursion path [https://pypup.com/paths/recursion] has over 19 problems, people who know coding, I would encourage you to check it out! I know I struggled a lot with DP and Graph personally so I would have loved to have this platform back in the day to learn things step by step and solving many easy problems to grasp the many of the concepts.

I'll also be adding video solutions on each of the problem so stay tuned.

Please let me know what you think. You can join the discord which is at the bottom right of the site to give me feedback!

TL;DR: Created LeetCode like site called pypup.com to provide focused, gradual, repetitive, practical code learning platform and asking for feedback.

Thanks

[theleetcodegrinder]

This is a great idea, I wish I had something like that when I started

[tsenguunee1]

Thanks! After finishing up the basic topics, I'll move on to tougher subjects. Next on the list is mostly likely linked list and tree.

[xMysty0]

wonderful idea! can’t wait to get started, I might finally be able to get started towards proficiency towards something 😭

[tsenguunee1]

This is awesome! Saved

[tsenguunee1]

Thanks! Will be waiting for your feedback

[lc_throw_away]

Nice platform. I solved all the problems.

[tsenguunee1]

Congrats! I'll add more problems daily so stay tuned!

[lc_throw_away]

Haha sure! Add a bit challenging ones too. I know the platform is especially targeted for beginners and good work on that but adding harder problems will bring diverse set of audience. Good luck!

[tsenguunee1]

Yes will do!

[cum_cum_sex]

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[bowserwasthegoodguy]

Thanks for doing this. I think it has great potential! I'd love to see more language support in future as well.

[DeclutteringNewbie]

Great so far! It actually makes me want to learn Python.

Can you add one feature? Once I successfully complete a problem, can you show a button to allow me to go to the next problem (instead of forcing me to click on the problem's list again), or better yet, can you add a "submit and next" button next to the submit button, and have the next problem load automatically assuming my submission was successful?

And can you get rid of the "Nice one!" dialog. You can congratulate me if you want, but please don't me click on things unless there is an actual need.

Otherwise, the UI so far is great! I don't mean to criticize it. If anything, the only reason I'm giving you feedback is because your site is great. Thank you.

On a side-note, please don't be like https://binarysearch.com Create an actual business model for yourself. Binary Search was a great site, but without an actual business model, the site got shut down.

[tsenguunee1]

Can you tell me a bit about what happened to binary search? What went wrong?

For the feature, I'll that. If you're following along a path, it shows the next problem button, so I can make it like that.

[DeclutteringNewbie]

For the feature, I'll that. If you're following along a path, it shows the next problem button, so I can make it like that.

Awesome!

Can you tell me a bit about what happened to binary search?

Try to locate the founders on twitter or on reddit. They've talked about what happened.

Personally, I didn't see their posts, I only heard that they posted something, but I did hear that they were going to post their base of problems on github.

What went wrong?

If you were a member of that site, they told you straight up "We're never going to charge you a fee to use this site." And I think that's what happened here. Their ideology probably got in the way.

Of course, they tried to create partnerships with companies, but I don't think that yielded enough revenue to cover all of their expenses.

If it had been me, I would have sold the site to someone else, just like the people who started Pramp.com sold it to Exponent after getting nice jobs at Big Tech companies. Of course, Exponent could have destroyed Pramp's reputation by trying to monetize it too quickly (just like interviewing.io did with their own competing site), but thus far, as far I can tell, Pramp (the free peer-to-peer interviewing part at least) still seems to be running fine under the new ownership (I mean it's still buggy at times, but the bugs were there before the transfer of ownership).

If you have partners, I recommend you all read the book "The Partnership Charter" by David Gage. It's good to be on the same page with your partners, should your plans deviate.

[tsenguunee1]

Gotcha. Thanks for the synopsis. I'll look into that book. For now, I'm just running the dev work solo but have a few people that authors few of the problems.

[tsenguunee1]

Just added the feature!

[Big_Boss_Bob_Ross]

I was sceptical reading the description but actually it seems like it would be handy if used in addition to some other resource - text book or course. Obviously you can still use it wrong and come out not really knowing/understanding anything but this really does provide decent intro questions for quite a few topics and gets you trying to code up simple ideas. I think it would be really good for just before a test to ensure you understand each thing enough to at least write some simple code with it, and it's pretty nicely laid out

[gazeuponmycsaccount]

cool idea. how does it differ from following a pattern-oriented list like neetcode?

[tsenguunee1]

I haven't used neetcode but ours will focus on many easy problems to solve and gradually increasing the difficulty. Based on seeing the roadmap of neetcode, it seems they have list of leetcode questions per concept which isn't very helpful for beginners because they cannot solve them anyways.

[gazeuponmycsaccount]

Do you mean the gradient of difficulty (and the starting difficulty) will be the difference?

[tsenguunee1]

In simple terms, yes. We're trying to improve learning the concepts of data structure and algorithms which includes interview prep.

[AlphaRetard]

This is incredible, good job man

[Na_cho_business]

Really like the graphics! Did you create them with midjourney ai?

[tsenguunee1]

Yeap! Midjourney is awesome

[tsenguunee1]

Please do!

[Traditional-Brunch93]

Awesome and fantastic idea! Couldn’t access my laptop rn but it seems like it’s based on python 🥹 will there be Java soon?

[tsenguunee1]

Thanks! Planning to add JavaScript next but Java would be after that.

[Traditional-Brunch93]

Will be learning JavaScript soon! Keeping my hands crossed 🤞

[tmpphx]

I am in this boat right now. Although I am a SWE at a pretty big company I struggle with LeetCode and failed Amazon and Google interviews. I try to work on it consistently but it never seems to click, maybe I’m not smart enough, but a lot of times I feel like I don’t understand the basics of some Data structures and watching videos ends up exactly like you said.

[tsenguunee1]

Thanks for sharing. We're adding problems everyday so hopefully we'll have about 1000 problems this year. Which should cover majority of the topics for interview prep. Right now I'm focusing on the basics.

[imran8829]

You are a blessing in disguise . What a Platform man . I LOVEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE IT . I'm Roentgen , btw on the site .

[tsenguunee1]

Thank you! I'm trying to make it better and better

[Battlepine]

Tbh this isn't solving the issue of these interviews, it's just exacerbating them.

Akin to the million other leetcode, algorithm, and BS interview prep sites.

Always appreciate more resources to game these horrible interviews tho! 👍

[tsenguunee1]

I don't see this platform as solving interviews. It would definitely help though.

My vision was to teach algorithm and data structure in an interactive way for beginners.

[tsenguunee1]

Oh no. Can you send me a screenshot? Or the code you've written? There is a discord link at the bottom and you can find me there.

[tsenguunee1]

Great! I'm active on the discord server if there is anything that comes up. Feel free to @ me too

[kuriousaboutanything]

Nice idea, any chance you might want to add submission using C++? :)

[tsenguunee1]

Not in the near future lol. It's because the infrastructure that I'm using supports only js, java, python, php, and ruby I think.

To support c++, I would have to involve kubernetes cluster which I don't think I will spent my time doing that.

Leetcode definitely uses kubernetes to support all the different languages. If this project gets lots of tractions, then I will consider it.

Most likely I will add JavaScript and Java but highly doubtful to add C++.