Aksharam — A tribute to my mother tongue

Sreya Satheesh — Tue, 12 May 2026 08:35:56 +0000

I enjoy learning languages, and at some point I wondered what it would feel like to build something for Malayalam.

That idea became Aksharam — a small Malayalam learning app for beginners.

Aksharam means letter in Malayalam.

The app currently includes:

സ്വരാക്ഷരങ്ങൾ — Vowels
വ്യഞ്ജനങ്ങൾ — Consonants
സ്വരചിഹ്നങ്ങൾ — Signs & Combinations
വാക്കുകൾ — Words
വാക്യങ്ങൾ — Sentences

It also includes audio and pronunciation support to help with listening and practice.

While building it, I wanted the learning experience to feel simple, clean, and easy to follow.

Learning a language takes repetition and familiarity over time. So instead of trying to add too much at once, I focused on smaller learning steps and basic everyday usage.

This project is also a small tribute to my mother tongue — a language I grew up hearing every day.

You can try it here:
https://aksharam-app.vercel.app/

What If DSA Was Taught Visually Instead of Just Theory?

Sreya Satheesh — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 03:53:58 +0000

👉 https://www.decoded-app.com/

When learning DSA, it’s easy to fall into a cycle of memorizing solutions.

You solve a problem, understand the code, and move on.

Then a few days later, a similar problem appears — and suddenly it feels unfamiliar again.

That usually happens because we remember the solution, but not the thinking behind it.

So I built Decoded.

A small app focused less on how problems are actually approached.

What Decoded does

Instead of jumping straight to the final solution, Decoded breaks problems down step by step.

It tries to show:

how you begin thinking about a problem
how patterns start becoming visible
how an approach slowly forms
and how the final solution evolves from there

You also get dry runs that show variables, pointers, and state changing as the algorithm runs.

The goal is to make the process feel less abstract and easier to follow.

Learning patterns instead of memorizing problems

One thing I noticed while learning DSA is that most problems aren’t completely unique.

A lot of them come back to a few common ideas:

sliding window
two pointers
prefix sum
DFS / BFS
heaps and so on

Once you start recognizing these patterns, solving problems feels less like starting from zero every time.

Decoded tries to make those patterns easier to notice.

Visual explanations

Some concepts are easier to understand when you can actually see them happening.

So for a few problems, I added visual breakdowns.

Things like:

a sliding window expanding and shrinking
DFS/BFS moving through a grid in Number of Islands
pointers shifting step by step

It’s less about reading the algorithm and more about watching the logic unfold.

Data structures

I also added short explanations for common data structures:

arrays
stacks
queues
trees
graphs
heaps
hashmaps

Nothing too theory-heavy.

Just enough to understand:

how they behave
where they’re useful
and why they appear so often in problems

That’s basically it.

Just a slower and clearer way to understand how DSA problems are solved.