You're Learning Algorithms in the Wrong Order (and I Built a Playground to Fix It)
There's a moment in almost every technical interview that separates people who learned algorithms from people who revised them.
The interviewer asks: "Quick sort is O(n log n) on average. Why does it degrade to O(n²)?"
If you learned the table first, you're now doing archaeology in real time — trying to reconstruct a mechanism from a summary of that mechanism. If you learned the mechanism first, the answer is one sentence and you're already saying it.
I built an interactive algorithm playground because I got tired of watching smart people fail that question. It's free, there's no sign-up, and there are 15 algorithms in it:
