How can you stay motivated while practicing Dynamic Programming?

2 Start with easy problems

One of the most common mistakes that beginners make is to jump into hard DP problems without building a solid foundation of easy and medium ones. This can lead to frustration, confusion, and loss of motivation. Instead, start with easy problems that have clear and well-defined subproblems and optimal solutions. You can find many such problems on online platforms like LeetCode, HackerRank, or Codeforces, or in books like Introduction to Algorithms or Cracking the Coding Interview. Try to solve them by yourself first, then compare your solution with the official or optimal one, and analyze the time and space complexity.

3 Learn from others

Another way to improve your DP skills and motivation is to learn from others who are more experienced or proficient in DP. You can watch online videos, read blogs, or join forums where they explain their thought process, techniques, and tricks for solving DP problems. You can also participate in online contests, hackathons, or coding challenges where you can compete with others and test your DP skills under time pressure. You can also ask for feedback, hints, or help from your peers, mentors, or instructors if you are stuck or have doubts.

4 Apply variations and patterns

One of the key aspects of DP is to recognize the patterns and variations that exist among different problems. For example, many DP problems can be classified into categories like knapsack, longest increasing subsequence, edit distance, matrix chain multiplication, or game theory. By learning these patterns and variations, you can apply them to new or similar problems and reduce the complexity and difficulty. You can also try to modify or extend existing problems by changing the constraints, inputs, or outputs, and see how that affects the DP solution.