Started practicing data structures and algorithms about four months ago specifically to prepare for interviews, doing roughly one problem a day on one of the popular practice sites, and for the first month or so it genuinely felt manageable and even somewhat satisfying whenever a solution actually clicked into place after some real effort on my part.
Somewhere around month three though, it started feeling like a genuine grind rather than actual learning, solving problems mechanically using patterns I had already memorized from similar earlier problems rather than actually understanding anything meaningfully new each time, and I have noticed my retention specifically dropping, revisiting a problem type from a few weeks earlier and genuinely struggling as if I had never actually seen anything like it before at all.
Tried switching up the practice routine a little, doing problems by specific topic in blocks instead of the fully randomized daily problem the site otherwise suggests by default, which has helped marginally with retention, though it has made the whole overall process feel noticeably slower in terms of visible daily progress compared to before.
A senior developer I know mentioned that quality of genuine understanding matters considerably more than the sheer raw quantity of problems actually attempted, and that revisiting the exact same problem after a week specifically to genuinely re-derive the solution from first principles, rather than immediately recalling the memorized pattern, actually builds much deeper and more durable understanding over time even though it obviously takes noticeably longer per individual problem this way.
I am trying to find a genuinely sustainable pace at this point that does not completely burn me out before my actual interviews even start happening, while still making real, measurable progress rather than just accumulating a large raw count of problems solved without much retained understanding behind that number.
For people who have actually gone through a longer serious DSA practice phase themselves, what pacing and structure genuinely worked best for you personally without it becoming exhausting enough to eventually just quit on entirely?