• SDE-2 || ex-samsung Intern || ex-IISC intern • 10+ hackathons winner • collab http://unfair.so/@unfiltered_ajit

I tried all dsa sheets, all YouTube tutorials, GFG , it didn’t work for me I kept solving questions, watching explanations, marking them done… and then a week later, I’d look at a similar problem and still have no idea where to start. I thought I needed more practice. Turns out I was learning problems, not patterns. That distinction changed DSA for me. Most sheets tell you which questions to solve. What I actually needed was someone to tell me: “Here are the recurring shapes these questions reduce to.” Sliding window isn’t one problem. Two pointers isn’t one problem. Monotonic stack isn’t one problem. They’re patterns that keep getting disguised as completely different questions. That’s when I found Thita’s 99 DSA Patterns Sheet. Instead of grinding another 300-question list, I started going pattern by pattern: understand the signal → recognize when it applies → solve variations → move on. And suddenly new LeetCode questions stopped feeling completely new. I still had to think. But at least I knew what kind of thinking to try first. Wish someone had given me the 99 patterns before giving me 500 problems.