Blog

Notes on data structures & algorithms, system design, and things I learn along the way.

AllDSAJavaScriptSystem Design
July 11, 2026Bit Manipulation Fundamentals3 min read

The operators every developer half-remembers — AND, OR, XOR, shifts — and the handful of tricks that turn them into fast, elegant solutions.

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July 11, 2026Tries: Searching by Prefix4 min read

The data structure behind autocomplete and spellcheck. How a trie stores words as shared character paths, and why lookups cost the length of the word — not the size of the dictionary.

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July 10, 2026Heaps and the Priority Queue4 min read

How a heap keeps the smallest (or largest) element one lookup away, why it's stored in a plain array, and the sift-up/sift-down operations that keep it valid.

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July 10, 2026Linked Lists and Floyd's Cycle Detection3 min read

Why linked lists still matter, and the two-pointer trick that detects a loop in one pass with no extra memory — the famous tortoise and hare.

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July 9, 2026Dynamic Programming: From Memoization to Tables3 min read

DP is not a scary black box — it's recursion that stops repeating itself. Follow one problem from exponential recursion to a linear table, one cell at a time.

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July 9, 2026Graph Traversal: BFS and DFS Side by Side3 min read

Breadth-first and depth-first search are the same algorithm with one data structure swapped. See both walk the same graph, and learn which to reach for.

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July 8, 2026Recursion and the Call Stack: What Actually Happens3 min read

Recursion feels like magic until you see the call stack. Here's the mechanical picture — frames pushing and popping — plus base cases, stack overflows, and tail calls.

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July 8, 2026Two Pointers and the Sliding Window3 min read

Two of the highest-leverage array patterns in interviews and real code — how they turn nested O(n²) loops into a single O(n) pass, and when each one applies.

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July 6, 2026Binary Search and BSTs: Halving Your Way to O(log n)5 min read

How binary search eliminates half the problem with every comparison, and how binary search trees turn the same idea into a data structure — with interactive animations.

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July 6, 2026Hash Maps Under the Hood: Why O(1) Comes With an Asterisk5 min read

How hash maps actually work — hashing, buckets, collisions, and resizing — with an animated walkthrough and a from-scratch implementation.

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July 6, 2026Building an LRU Cache From Scratch4 min read

Why the classic interview question is really a lesson in composing data structures — with an animated walkthrough and two working implementations.

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July 6, 2026Quick Sort and Heap Sort: The In-Place O(n log n) Sorts6 min read

A visual walkthrough of quick sort and heap sort — how partitioning and heaps achieve O(n log n) without merge sort's extra memory, with animated demos and code in Java and JavaScript.

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July 5, 2026Sorting Algorithms Explained: Bubble, Selection, Insertion, and Merge Sort5 min read

A visual, hands-on walkthrough of four classic sorting algorithms with animated demos and code in both Java and JavaScript.

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