1700 days of showing up. Started from panic, stayed for the love of it.

July 2021. I blanked my first ever coding assessment. 4 problems, 90 minutes, solved zero. Could not write a brute force on any of them.

I opened LeetCode the next morning.

8 hours a day for 10 months. Some days 50+ submissions. Month 4 I started entering timed contests because grinding alone felt like lying to myself. One of those contests I placed Global Rank 22 out of 40,000+ people.

That was four years ago. The daily streak has not broken since.

Today is day 1700. I am not doing this for a job switch. The habit built from panic just stayed, and now I would miss it if it stopped.

The one thing that moved the needle most: upsolving. Any problem I could not solve in a contest, I came back to within 48 hours. This forces you into the exact spots where you are weak rather than the comfortable patterns you already know.