Week 6: Advanced Graphs, 1-D DP

Oct 20–26  ·  Target times: Easy ≤ 10m · Medium ≤ 22m · Hard ≤ 40m

Daily routine: 75 min DSA (timed) + 10 min syntax typing + 35 min second block. Talk out loud. No AI autocomplete. Over cap → 48h redo queue.

Day 1

DSA set 1 of 5

DSA problems (75 min, timed)

Second block (35 min) — System Design + CS: SD practice + first mocks
2 full SD prompts out loud (systemdesign.io / Exponent — attempt first, then compare). Revisit weak OS/DBMS/networking. Outcome: complete a 45-min SD mock unaided.

Day 2

DSA set 2 of 5

DSA problems (75 min, timed)

Second block (35 min) — ML/DL: Loss, optimization, regularization
Cross-entropy, focal loss (imbalanced — your domain), dropout, batchnorm, LR schedules. Most important: justify loss/regularization for imbalanced data. Outcome: defend a choice in 2 min.

Day 3

DSA set 3 of 5

DSA problems (75 min, timed)

Second block (35 min) — System Design + CS: SD practice + first mocks
2 full SD prompts out loud (systemdesign.io / Exponent — attempt first, then compare). Revisit weak OS/DBMS/networking. Outcome: complete a 45-min SD mock unaided.

Day 4

DSA set 4 of 5

DSA problems (75 min, timed)

Second block (35 min) — ML/DL: Loss, optimization, regularization
Cross-entropy, focal loss (imbalanced — your domain), dropout, batchnorm, LR schedules. Most important: justify loss/regularization for imbalanced data. Outcome: defend a choice in 2 min.

Day 5

DSA set 5 of 5

DSA problems (75 min, timed)

Second block (35 min) — System Design + CS: SD practice + first mocks
2 full SD prompts out loud (systemdesign.io / Exponent — attempt first, then compare). Revisit weak OS/DBMS/networking. Outcome: complete a 45-min SD mock unaided.

Weekend

Project + review
🚀 PROJECT 2 — Inference server (FINISH weekend)
Add batched/queued vs naive comparison, monitoring (Prometheus/metrics), Docker + GitHub Actions CI, README with latency/throughput chart. Push. Milestone: Project 2 live.
Also: 1 system-design practice out loud. Redo any DSA problem that went over cap (48h queue).