The Only Interview Prep Sheet I Actually Finished

Open the NeetCode 150 + Blind 75 tracker Somewhere around problem #40 of "just solving whatever LeetCode recommends," I realized I wasn't actually getting better at interviews. I was getting better at forgetting things I'd already solved. The pattern was always the same: solve a hard DP problem on a Tuesday, feel like a genius, then blank on a nearly identical one three weeks later because I never connected it back to the pattern underneath. I wasn't building a mental model. I was collecting one-off wins. So I rebuilt my prep from scratch around a single idea: there are maybe 15–18 core patterns in coding interviews, and everything else is a variation. Once that clicked, I stopped treating problems as isolated puzzles and started treating them as instances of a template I already knew. That reframe is what turned into the sheet I want to show you. The list: NeetCode 150 + Blind 75, merged and organized by pattern Most people prep off either the NeetCode 150 or the original Blind 75 — rarely both, and almost never in a format that shows you why problems are grouped the way they are. I merged them into one tracker, organized strictly by pattern, with a prerequisite list and a one-line "key pattern" cheat for each section. A few examples of what that looks like in practice: Arrays & Hashing — the whole section boils down to one question: "What complement, count, or group do I need to look up instantly?" Once you internalize that, Two Sum, Group Anagrams, and Longest Consecutive Sequence stop being three different problems and become three applications of the same hash-lookup instinct. Sliding Window — expand right, shrink left when a constraint breaks, track state in a hashmap or counter. That's it. That's Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters and Minimum Window Substring and Sliding Window Maximum, at three different difficulty levels. Binary Search — the moment you see a sorted or monotonic search space, even one that doesn't look like an array (think Koko Eating Bananas), the template is the same: lo, hi, mid, adjust bounds. Every section in the tracker follows this structure: prerequisites → the underlying pattern in one sentence → the problem list, tagged by difficulty, with an ⭐ marking original Blind 75 problems and a 💡 flagging the ones that show up constantly in real interviews. It covers all 18 sections — Arrays & Hashing through Math & Geometry — 150+ problems total, with checkboxes so you can actually track completion instead of losing your progress in fifteen different browser tabs. Why I didn't just make this a static PDF I built and track this list inside MarkVault, a Markdown workspace I've been building for exactly this kind of thing — long, evolving reference documents that you actually revisit instead of write once and abandon. The reasons that mattered to me specifically: Checkboxes that persist. I check off a problem, close my laptop, come back a week later — it's still checked. Sounds trivial until you've lost progress in a Notion doc that didn't sync. No signup wall to just look at it. You can open the shared link and read the whole thing before deciding if it's worth your time. It's just Markdown underneath. No proprietary format, no lock-in. If you want your own copy, you copy the text and you're done. You can view the live, actively-tracked version here: 👉 Open the NeetCode 150 + Blind 75 tracker How I'd actually use it if I were starting today Don't start at the top. Start with Arrays & Hashing and Two Pointers — they're prerequisites for almost everything else, including half the "advanced" sections. Do the 💡 problems first, even out of order. They're flagged because they show up disproportionately often in real interview loops, not because they're the easiest. When you finish a section, don't move on immediately. Go back and reread the "Key Pattern" line. If you can't explain it out loud without looking, you memorized the solution instead of learning the pattern — and it won't transfer to the next unfamiliar problem. Revisit, don't just complete. A checkbox means you solved it once. It doesn't mean you'll solve the next variant of it under interview pressure. Come back to sections after a few weeks and re-solve two or three problems cold. That last point is the whole reason I built this as a living, revisitable document instead of a checklist I'd fill out once and forget. Interview prep that doesn't get revisited isn't really prep — it's just a to-do list you felt good about finishing. If you're deep in interview prep right now, or about to start, take the merged list for a spin. It's free to view, no account needed, and it's the actual sheet I use not a cleaned-up version I made for the internet. Open the tracker →