Popular Online Platforms

I've made up my mind. I want to attain an appealing physique. From now on, I'll go to the gym daily for about an hour and closely watch my gym trainer work out. Within a year, I'll look like Hrithik Roshan. 💪🏻

Sounds pretty stupid? Well, it is. Observing my trainer work out can help me learn the right technique, but how will I muscle up without working out myself?

Similarly, watching those online DSA tutorials or reading this course, no doubt, can help you learn the right tools/techniques, but you'll be able to master DSA if and only if you get your hands dirty and PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE!

LeetCode

Leetcode, in my opinion, is probably the most popular platform to practice DSA for technical interviews. With over 3000 problems, it contains a lot of problems from each of the important topics.

In addition, it runs two different contests, Weekly and Biweekly, and participating regularly in these contests is highly recommended to track your progress and, well, win goodies if you're one of the top performers.

CodeForces

CodeForces is another platform celebrated across the world. Now, this platform caters more to something called Competitive Programming. It conducts regular contests wherein people can come and participate.

Like chess, a rating and a title are associated with each profile, which changes according to that person's performance in different contests. Like Magnus Carlsen for Chess, this guy is considered the best in the world for Competitive Programming.

Conclusion

Look at it this way.

If, in general, the college professors teach for Board Exams, and the level of questions asked in most technical interviews is JEE Main, then LeetCode can be seen as a collection of previous year question papers of JEE Main, and CodeForces as a collection of a lot of mock exams of JEE Advanced. There are also many other platforms, but knowing about these two is enough for now.

You can try & practice on both of these and see what you like better.

If your target is to crack technical interviews in product-based companies, do some practice on LeetCode.

If you want to compete and get that adrenaline rush after solving hard problems, getting better and better ranks over time, and increasing your rating & title, CodeForces is worth checking out.

Just so you know, we'll be covering a lot of problems from both of these platforms (and more...) ✌🏻