Goal: “Repetition is the mother of learning.” — This is the heaviest week by topic count, but don’t panic. DSA Pass 2 is re-reading, not learning from scratch. DevOps topics are quick practical reads. Aptitude is formulaic — shortcuts and mental math. We’re in the home stretch, and this week is about making sure nothing falls through the cracks.
Topics
DSA Pass 2 — Spread Across Study Breaks: These additional topics should be revisited throughout the week whenever we have spare time between sessions: Knapsack Patterns · Greedy Algorithms · Backtracking · Intervals · Hash Maps and Sets · Sorting Algorithms · Graph Representations · Shortest Path Algorithms · Union Find · Tries · Common Interview Patterns
Note: Yes, this is a lot of topics — but let’s break it down. DSA Pass 2 is re-reading notes we’ve already studied and solved problems for. We’re going for instant recall, not deep learning. DevOps topics are practical and quick — Docker, CI/CD, and caching are things most of us have used. Aptitude is about learning shortcuts, not grinding through derivations. The full aptitude collection has 48 topics — we’ve picked the 15 most commonly tested ones here. If a specific company requires heavy aptitude, go through the rest of the collection separately.
Key Concepts
- Docker containerizes applications so they run the same everywhere — dev, staging, production. A Dockerfile defines how to build an image. Docker Compose orchestrates multiple containers. These are must-knows for any backend interview.
- CI/CD automates the build-test-deploy pipeline. CI (Continuous Integration) = automatically build and test on every push. CD (Continuous Deployment) = automatically deploy passing builds. GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI — the tools differ, the concept is the same.
- For aptitude: focus on shortcuts and mental math tricks, not grinding through every formula. Percentages, ratios, and time-speed-distance cover 60% of aptitude questions. The last 3 topics (mental math tricks, approximation, and time management) are meta-skills that make everything faster.
- DSA Pass 2 isn’t about learning — it’s about instant recall. When we see a problem, the pattern should click within 30 seconds. Two pointers for sorted arrays, sliding window for subarrays, binary search for monotonic search spaces, BFS for shortest path in unweighted graphs, DP for overlapping subproblems. If any of these don’t feel automatic yet, that’s what this pass is for.
Practice
- DSA: Solve 1 problem from each of the 7 major patterns — array (two pointers/sliding window), tree (traversal/BST), graph (BFS/DFS), DP (1D or 2D), greedy, backtracking, and binary search
- DevOps: Write a Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml for a simple Node.js app with a PostgreSQL database
- Aptitude: Time yourself on 10 percentage/ratio problems — aim for under 2 minutes each
- DSA Pass 2: For each topic, ask yourself “what’s the pattern?” and “when do I use this?” — if the answer doesn’t come in 10 seconds, re-read the note
~40+ topic touches · ~2.5 hrs/day · Triple-track: DSA Pass 2 + DevOps + Aptitude