LeetCode didn't exist back when I was in high school doing programming contests. The team of 3 people I was part of did a few rather unusual things in part bec

LeetCode didn't exist back when I was in high school doing programming contests. The team of 3 people I was part of did a few rather unusual things in part because of my exposure to Linux at the time, namely making use of tools like yacc and bision to quickly come up quickly with concise solutions to a number of the string parsing problems we encountered in the contests. I've never felt the need to explicitly study for interviews. Given the wide range of programming tasks I've encountered over the years, along with countless hours spent reading programming books and magazine articles, I know enough to be dangerous, and where to look when I'm not sure. Simply being aware that there is somewhere to to look is half the battle.