Practice should be an accurate microcosm of the situations you'll face in the real world. It should be simplified in focus, but not artificial in its constraints. No leetcode problem reflects the reality of daily life as a developer. Leetcode, the mathematics Putnam competition, all Olympiads, competitive spelling bees, all of these competitions lead to solutions that are intensely overfit to the specific artificial constraints of the problem. The problems of life involve many soft constraints. Rules that can be broken in exchange for something else. In practice, seek out smaller versions of the large problem you want to solve, unconstrained in how you accomplish what you're aiming for, and constrained only in the size of what you aim to accomplish. See: [[Don't Overfit to Perfection]] See: [[Avoid Top Down Control]] See: [[Loss functions over Hard Requirements]] See [[Ignore Techniques Overfit to the Problem Statement]]