12-Week Accelerated Track

Audience: You have a deadline in 8–14 weeks (a known interview, an offer expiring, a layoff window). You can put in 25–35 hours/week.

Tradeoffs you are accepting:

• You will skip Phase 7 (competitive programming) almost entirely.
• You will skip Phase 12 (grandmaster) entirely.
• You will get to “competent at FAANG mediums” not “consistently solves FAANG hards in 45 minutes”.
• Concept depth is sacrificed for problem volume in some weeks.

This track is sufficient for: new-grad / SWE2 FAANG, scaleups, most backend/platform roles. This track is NOT sufficient for: staff/principal interviews, quant/HFT, compiler/runtime, distributed systems specialty roles.

Daily Cadence

• Weekday: 3–5 hours
  • 90 min: new content (read concept doc + work through 1 lab)
  • 90 min: problem solving (3–5 problems)
  • 30 min: review (spaced repetition queue)
  • 30 min: failure analysis if you missed anything
• Saturday: 6 hours
  • 1 mock interview (90 min including review)
  • 4 hours problem solving
  • 30 min review
• Sunday: 4 hours
  • Weakness drilling on top failure category
  • Re-solve all this week’s failures
  • Plan next week

Total: 25–30 hours/week

Weekly Plan

Week 1 — Foundation Reset

Goal: Stop being random. Internalize the framework.

• Read README.md, FRAMEWORK.md, COMMUNICATION.md, CODE_QUALITY.md in full
• Complete all 7 labs in phase-00-execution-baseline/
• 25 LeetCode Easy problems applying the framework rigorously (full restate, brute force, optimize, test)
• 0 mocks (you’re not ready)

Mastery check: You can solve LeetCode Easy in 12 minutes with the full framework, narrating throughout.

Week 2 — Foundations Of Data Structures

• Read all 15 DS docs in phase-01-foundations/data-structures/
• 30 problems: array, string, hashmap, stack, queue (mostly Easy + a few Medium)
• 1 mock (Easy level)
• Read phase-01-foundations/runtime/ — stack vs heap, scope/lifetime, mutable vs immutable

Mastery check: Operations + complexity table for every DS reproducible from memory.

Week 3 — Linked Lists, Trees, Recursion

• Phase 1 labs: linked list reversal, recursion, binary search, basic trees
• 25 problems (15 Easy + 10 Medium)
• Read remaining runtime docs in Phase 1
• 1 mock (Easy/Medium mix)

Week 4 — Pattern Onboarding (Part 1)

• Read patterns: two pointers, sliding window, prefix sums, hashing, sorting+greedy, binary search, monotonic stack
• For each pattern: 4–5 problems (Medium-leaning)
• 1 mock (Medium)

Mastery check: Can recognize each pattern’s signal in <2 minutes for unseen problems.

Week 5 — Pattern Onboarding (Part 2)

• Read patterns: monotonic queue, intervals, linked list manipulation, tree DFS/BFS, graph DFS/BFS, topological sort
• 30 problems across these patterns
• 1 mock (Medium)

Week 6 — Pattern Onboarding (Part 3) + DP Intro

• Read patterns: union find, backtracking, basic DP, 1D DP
• Read phase-05-dp/concepts/ — memoization, state definition, transitions, base cases
• 25 DP problems (Easy → Medium)
• 1 mock (Medium)

Mastery check: Can write the brute → memo → tabulated → space-optimized progression for any 1D DP.

Week 7 — Trie, Heap, K-way Merge, 2D DP

• Read patterns: trie, heap top-K, K-way merge, 2D DP, knapsack, subsequence DP, string DP
• 25 problems
• 1 mock (Medium-Hard)

Week 8 — Graphs Deep Dive

• Read phase-04-graphs/algorithms/: BFS, DFS, multi-source BFS, 0-1 BFS, Dijkstra, topological sort, cycle detection, MST (Kruskal+Prim), union find
• 25 graph problems
• 2 product-style labs from phase-04-graphs/labs/
• 1 mock (Medium-Hard graph-heavy)

Week 9 — DP Deeper + Greedy

• Read DP categories: tree DP, interval DP, bitmask DP (overview), knapsack variants, LIS, edit distance
• Read phase-06-greedy/concepts/: greedy choice, exchange argument, invariants
• 25 problems (mix DP + greedy)
• 2 greedy labs (with proofs)
• 1 mock (Medium-Hard mixed)

Week 10 — Practical Engineering Coding

• Complete labs from phase-08-practical-engineering/: LRU cache, rate limiter, autocomplete, thread pool, KV store, retry+backoff
• Read your primary language’s track in phase-09-language-runtime/
• 15 problems (mediums + 1–2 hards)
• 2 mocks (1 Big Tech phone, 1 Big Tech onsite)

Week 11 — Hard Problems + Mock Marathon

• 20 LeetCode Hard problems
• Daily mock interviews (5 mocks this week, mix of phase-11-mock-interviews/ types)
• Failure analysis on every mock
• Drill top failure category

Week 12 — Polish, Confidence, Rest

• 3 mocks (cold, varied — no pre-warmup)
• Re-solve top 30 problems from spaced repetition queue
• Complete READINESS_CHECKLIST.md honestly
• 1 day complete rest before interview

Problem Volume Targets

Review Schedule (per SPACED_REPETITION.md)

Use the abbreviated tier schedule for accelerated track:

• Tier 1: same day
• Tier 2: 2 days
• Tier 3: 1 week
• Tier 4: 2 weeks
• (Skip tiers 5–6 — you don’t have time before interviews)

What This Track Cannot Buy You

• Deep competitive-programming intuition (Phase 7)
• Grandmaster-level pattern recognition (Phase 12)
• Long-term retention of all 270 problems (you’ll forget ~30% within 3 months without continued review)
• The kind of polish that comes from 6+ months of practice

If you finish Week 12 and your interview is delayed by 8+ weeks, switch to the 6-month track for the remaining time. Use the buffer to backfill Phase 7 basics and harden weak patterns.