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I.K
I.K

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πŸ“… Week 1 Recap: System Design + DSA Journey

Hello everyone! This week I began my daily learning journey β€” diving into System Design concepts (via the roadmap.sh System Design Roadmap) and solving DSA challenges on LeetCode.

βœ… 7 days straight of showing up. Here are the highlights:


πŸ— System Design Concepts Covered

  • Latency vs Throughput β†’ Learned how speed (latency) and volume (throughput) trade off in system performance.
  • Consistency Patterns β†’ Strong, Weak, and Eventual β€” and where each makes sense (finance vs gaming vs social media).
  • Availability Patterns β†’ Redundancy, Replication, Load Balancing, Circuit Breakers, etc.
  • Failover β†’ Active-passive vs active-active setups, and why resilience always adds complexity.

πŸ’‘ Biggest Insight: System Design is about trade-offs, not absolutes. You never get high availability, high consistency, and high performance all at once.


πŸ’» DSA Problems Tackled

  • Regular Expression Matching (hard) β†’ Recursive approach stretched my thinking.
  • Integer ↔ Roman Conversions β†’ Dictionary lookups + loops made the logic clean.
  • Longest Common Prefix β†’ Sorting trick was an elegant win.

πŸ’‘ Biggest Insight: For DSA, sometimes brute force teaches you the problem space β€” but the best solutions come from reframing (like sorting or recursion).


πŸ† Week 1 Reflections

  • Showed up daily despite challenges (some problems took 2–3 hours).
  • Learned to balance deep dives (like regex recursion) with practical clarity (like Roman numeral conversions).
  • Seeing patterns emerge between System Design and DSA: both are about trade-offs and structured problem solving.

πŸš€ What’s Next (Week 2 Goals)

  • Push into more advanced system design topics (e.g., gRPC, DB sharding, caching strategies).
  • Continue solving medium/hard LeetCode problems, but improve on timeboxing solutions.
  • Start sharing shorter code insights to make posts even more practical for readers.

🀝 Let’s Connect!

That’s Week 1 in the books πŸŽ‰.

If you’ve been following along, I’d love to hear:

  • Which System Design trade-off do you find most challenging in real projects?
  • What’s your DSA strategy β€” brute force first or optimal-first thinking?
  • Or just drop a πŸ’‘ to celebrate learning and consistency!

Your engagement helps me keep momentum, and I’d love to make Week 2 even better β€” for me and for everyone reading πŸš€.


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