u/Chemical-Handle-7393

Started leetcode in September last year. Went full pattern-wise — two pointers, sliding window, graphs, DP, the works. Covered all major algorithms methodically.
April and May have been inconsistent but I’ve held the line at one problem a day minimum.

Here’s where it broke down: after March I realized I needed to start doing random problems to make my pattern recognition actually work under pressure, not just when I know the topic. And that’s when everything fell apart. I couldn’t identify patterns, let alone implement them cleanly.

So I went back to topic-wise revision — one topic per week. It helped a little, but the pattern recognition under randomness hasn’t improved the way I expected.
Now I’m doing mediums only with a 25-minute timer.

Three things I genuinely can’t figure out:

1. How do you do more than one problem a day?
   I can’t concentrate beyond 30 minutes at a stretch. By the second problem I’m just staring at the screen. Is this a focus issue or am I approaching sessions wrong?

2. Spaced repetition sounds great until it isn’t
   Set up a sheet to retry problems at 7, 14, 21 days. But it compounds so fast that some days I have 10 problems queued and I just… don’t do any of them. The backlog killed the habit.

3. What does your actual study structure look like?
   How many problems, how long, how do you decide what to revisit?

Nine months in and I feel like I’m grinding but not progressing. Would love to hear what actually worked for people.

Ps - want to get into Salesforce/Gojek sorts

I have the first round scheduled with them next week and have no idea what's it about.

Any insight on what it is about - ai/real? Leetcode? LLD? HLD?

If you are working at Paylocity -

- How is the work culture?

- I saw a couple of posts on reddit about firings/layoffs and hiring freeze at paylocity. Are the rumors true?

I will keep updating this post as I pass/fail each round 😛

I am not sure if I applied through Linkedin or Naukri, guessing it was Naukri. The India office is 1yr old and has 200 people.

Recruiter reached out and did a basic check on qualifications and experience.

First round -

- The interviewer asked for intro and projects. No deep dive as such but I explained two of my projects that I am most proud of. He asked about the architecture/what was the layering etc. What was used as communication [rabbitmq and signalr] ?

- Then he gave a sample workflow - User places an order. How would you calculate the discount and place the order + notify the service.

- how would you notify without blocking the current thread? [async/await]

- some stuff on concurrent programming.

- would you do exception handeling?

- what design patterns have you used in your projects?

According to the recruiter there are 3 more rounds. Not sure what those rounds would be about, because this was heavy on LLD and language fundamentals.

Hope this helps.

Not selling anything, genuinely trying to understand how people handle this before I build something that nobody asked for.

Here's the specific situation I'm curious about: you've sent your invoice, due date has passed, client hasn't paid. What actually happens next?

Specifically trying to understand:

• What tool did you use to send the invoice — Swipe, Refrens, WhatsApp PDF, Google Docs template, something else?
• When it's overdue, do you follow up manually or does something remind you / do it automatically?
• If you follow up manually — how does that feel? Easy, awkward, stressful?
• Has a client ever gone silent on an overdue invoice? What did you do?
• Do you have one place where you can see all your active clients and what they owe you right now, or is it spread across multiple places?

I'm a software engineer who freelances on the side and I hate this part of the process. Wondering if others feel the same or if I'm the only one who finds it painful and just needs to get better at it.

Bonus question: would you pay ₹150–200/month for a tool that handles the follow-up automatically via WhatsApp so you never have to send that awkward "just checking in" message yourself?

At some point I realized I couldn't keep opening every call with "hi, how are you." It's not that it's rude — it's just that it's nothing. It fills the silence without actually connecting to the person on the other side.

The problem gets harder when you're working across cultures. What's a natural opener for me doesn't always land the same way for someone in a completely different timezone, with a different relationship to small talk, a different sense of what's appropriate before a work call. You get good at reading the room eventually but for a long time you're just guessing.

I tried keeping a mental list of things to say. Googling things like "how to make small talk with European colleagues." Asking ChatGPT, which works but becomes a conversation in itself when you have 90 seconds before the call starts.

Eventually I just built something — you pick the country, age group, and meeting type, and it gives you 3 culturally-specific openers in 30 seconds. It also tells you what cultural reference it drew from so you can decide if it actually fits before you use it.

Sharing it here in case anyone else finds the pre-call small talk thing as genuinely hard as I did: https://icebreaker-tau-rouge.vercel.app

Curious if this resonates or if it's just me.

I work remotely with colleagues across Germany, the US, and Japan, and I always struggled with the first 2 minutes of a call. Not because I'm socially awkward (okay, maybe a little), but because small talk that lands in India doesn't land the same way in Munich.

So I built IceBreak — you pick your colleague's country, age group, and meeting type, optionally drop in something personal about them ("they just got promoted", "big cricket fan"), and it spits out 3 conversation openers that don't sound like they came from an HR handbook.

Stack: React + Vite, Vercel serverless function, raw fetch to the Claude API. ~400 lines of code total.

Try it: https://icebreaker-tau-rouge.vercel.app

Curious if this resonates with anyone else on non-Western remote teams. Would also love brutal feedback on the outputs — I know the India suggestions still need work.

I have an interview with Netsmart on Monday. This is for a C# asp.net developer [4-7yoe]. The interview has 3 rounds and the first one is called ‘Technical Discussion’.

Did anyone recently interview for them? What was the nature of the interview? And what type of question were asked?

A friend was switching vets for her dog and had no idea what vaccines he'd had or when. She spent 20 minutes texting through old WhatsApp chats trying to find a photo of a prescription. The vet was waiting.

I watched this and figured there had to be a decent app for this. There wasn't — or at least not one I'd actually recommend to her. Most require an account, sync everything to a server, and charge a subscription for what is essentially a glorified notes app. She's not paying a monthly fee to store her dog's deworming date.

So I built Petfolio.

What it does:

⁠Stores vaccines, medications, vet visits, medical events — all on your device, not my server

• ⁠Generates a shareable health report (useful for groomers, boarding, new vets)

• ⁠Reminds you about upcoming vaccines and meds

• ⁠Backup/restore via ZIP so you're never locked in

What it honestly doesn't do yet:

⁠Push notifications (in-app reminders work, push is coming)

• ⁠Cross-device sync (local-first means your data stays local — that's intentional)

It's free. No subscription. No ads. I have no database of your pet's records — they live on your device.

I'm a developer, not a pet owner, so I'm probably missing things that are obvious to anyone who actually has an animal. That's exactly why I'm posting — tell me what's wrong, what's missing, what would make you use this.

Link: https://petfolio.co.in/

I have been an SDE for 5 years and I know in my heart that I don't belong to this field. I think I am bad at it, and it's suffocating me. I have been thinking about this pivot and wanted to check if anybody has done it. Everywhere I read, people say that I'll have to take a pay cut to make it to a product role because I have 0yrs of experience. Is that true? Or If anybody has done it - do you like it in product engineering?

A friend was switching vets for her dog and had no idea what vaccines he'd had or when. She spent 20 minutes texting through old WhatsApp chats trying to find a photo of a prescription. The vet was waiting.

I watched this and figured there had to be a decent app for this. There wasn't — or at least not one I'd actually recommend to her. Most require an account, sync everything to a server, and charge a subscription for what is essentially a glorified notes app. She's not paying a monthly fee to store her dog's deworming date.

So I built Petfolio.

What it does:

• Stores vaccines, medications, vet visits, medical events — all on your device, not my server
• Generates a shareable health report (useful for groomers, boarding, new vets)
• Reminds you about upcoming vaccines and meds
• Backup/restore via ZIP so you're never locked in

What it honestly doesn't do yet:

• Push notifications (in-app reminders work, push is coming)
• Cross-device sync (local-first means your data stays local — that's intentional)

It's free. No subscription. No ads. I have no database of your pet's records — they live on your device.

I'm a developer, not a pet owner, so I'm probably missing things that are obvious to anyone who actually has an animal. That's exactly why I'm posting — tell me what's wrong, what's missing, what would make you use this.

Link: petfolio.co.in