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Sreya Satheesh
Sreya Satheesh

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What If DSA Was Taught Visually Instead of Just Theory?

👉 https://www.decoded-app.com/

When learning DSA, it’s easy to fall into a cycle of memorizing solutions.

You solve a problem, understand the code, and move on.

Then a few days later, a similar problem appears — and suddenly it feels unfamiliar again.

That usually happens because we remember the solution, but not the thinking behind it.

So I built Decoded.

A small app focused less on how problems are actually approached.


What Decoded does

Instead of jumping straight to the final solution, Decoded breaks problems down step by step.

It tries to show:

  • how you begin thinking about a problem
  • how patterns start becoming visible
  • how an approach slowly forms
  • and how the final solution evolves from there

You also get dry runs that show variables, pointers, and state changing as the algorithm runs.

The goal is to make the process feel less abstract and easier to follow.


Learning patterns instead of memorizing problems

One thing I noticed while learning DSA is that most problems aren’t completely unique.

A lot of them come back to a few common ideas:

  • sliding window
  • two pointers
  • prefix sum
  • DFS / BFS
  • heaps and so on

Once you start recognizing these patterns, solving problems feels less like starting from zero every time.

Decoded tries to make those patterns easier to notice.


Visual explanations

Some concepts are easier to understand when you can actually see them happening.

So for a few problems, I added visual breakdowns.

Things like:

  • a sliding window expanding and shrinking
  • DFS/BFS moving through a grid in Number of Islands
  • pointers shifting step by step

It’s less about reading the algorithm and more about watching the logic unfold.


Data structures

I also added short explanations for common data structures:

  • arrays
  • stacks
  • queues
  • trees
  • graphs
  • heaps
  • hashmaps

Nothing too theory-heavy.

Just enough to understand:

  • how they behave
  • where they’re useful
  • and why they appear so often in problems

That’s basically it.

Just a slower and clearer way to understand how DSA problems are solved.

👉 https://www.decoded-app.com/

Top comments (1)

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AS VAIBHAV RAJ •

This is amazing resource thanks i was planning on restarting my dsa guess there isn’t a better time then now