I walked into college with an empty mind. No special tech experience, no path—just big hopes, a feeling that I needed to make the most of it, and a strong wish to learn everything even if it didn’t seem helpful for my job at the time. (That, and a habit of watching movies and listening to podcasts until 3 in the morning.)

Fast forward. Now I am standing at the start of my final year. Looking back, the last two years feel like an out-of-focus mix of chaos, unfinished plans, and just getting by. In the middle of all that, there was one thing I never forgot: the DSA work.

The LeetCode Path (and the Dev Void)

To be honest:

• My first year was about trying to figure out what LeetCode even was.
• By the fourth semester, I finally started taking it seriously, put my head down, and began solving problems regularly.

I actually grew to love solving problems—the excitement of finding the best way, dealing with tricky cases, and seeing the time complexity drop from \(O(N^2)\) to $O(N)$.

The problem? I never really felt the natural interest in development.

While others around me were building apps and doing full-stack stuff, I realized something that made me uncomfortable: I didn’t have strong, complete projects to show for my problem-solving skills.

In a world where it’s easy to press Tab and let AI write the code, the real challenge is to avoid the shortcut—learning how things really work, breaking them, and building them properly.

Why "Oops It Ran"?

If you code, you know that unreal feeling:

You submit a solution expecting a Time Limit Exceeded or a Segmentation Fault.

You hold your breath, hit submit...

Suddenly—Accepted. All test cases passed.

Wait. Oops, it actually worked?!

That mix of surprise, relief, and accidental win is the real part of being an engineering student.

From now on, that's the goal: trying to reach the "Oops It Ran" state in both DSA and real development.

What You'll Find Here

This blog is my promise to myself. Over the year, I’ll be writing about:

• The LeetCode & DSA Log: Explaining tough patterns, tricky edge cases, and how I think about problems.
• The Dev Journey from Scratch: Building projects without copying or using AI to do the work.
• Pre-Final Year Realities: Thoughts on interview preparation, practice tests, and the daily work of finding my way in engineering.