The hardest part of algorithm interview prep was not learning binary search or two pointers for the first time. It was opening an old problem months later and realizing that the pattern had quietly disappeared.
During an active interview cycle, a full coding session makes sense. Between interview cycles, it usually feels too expensive: open the laptop, reread a long prompt, set up the editor, debug edge cases, and lose an evening to what was supposed to be maintenance.
I started treating learning a pattern and keeping a pattern available as two different jobs.
A smaller maintenance loop
For maintenance, I wanted four constraints:
