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Library of Chintan — Browse the Tales by Pattern

Index of the Kingdom

Browse the tales by arc, pattern, or real-world crisis.

The Library is your navigation layer. Instead of scrolling a long list of posts, you choose by where you are stuck: beginner or advanced, confused about a data structure, or wrestling with focus, trade-offs, or panic.

From here you can:
  • Jump into one of the three main arcs of the Kingdom.
  • Find all stories that share a particular algorithm pattern.
  • Search by “life situation” — attention, deadlines, conflict, crisis.
Stories as nodes · Patterns as edges
Way 1
Browse by Story Arc

Pick a region of the Kingdom and stay there for a while. Gurukul builds your fundamentals. Court of Chintan deals with strategy and trade-offs. Legendary Crises is where everything catches fire at once.

Arc I — Beginner
🏛️ The Gurukul
Stories of first patterns and beginner mistakes.
Follow Arjun as he learns arrays, greedy choices, recursion, sliding windows, trees, priority queues, and backtracking — all as small crises that feel like your first years as a developer.
Good if you’re early-career, still shaky on fundamentals, or want to rebuild intuition from the ground up.
View all Gurukul tales ↗
Arc II — Intermediate
⚖️ Court of Chintan
Where strategies argue with each other.
Tales of merchants, generals, and royal debates. The same patterns you learned in the Gurukul now compete: which is cheaper, safer, more robust under nasty edge cases?
Good if you know the basics but still struggle to choose the right approach for a problem.
Visit the Court shelves ↗
Arc III — Advanced
🔥 Legendary Crises
When correctness alone is not enough.
Kingdom-level disasters: routing supplies, defending borders, optimizing scarce resources. Data structures and algorithms work together under extreme constraints.
Good if you’re interview-ready, building systems at work, or just enjoy high-stakes puzzles.
Browse Legendary Crises ↗
Way 2
Browse by Algorithm Pattern

If you know the name of the thing you’re weak at, skip straight to it. Each shelf here collects all the stories that rely on a particular pattern — plus links to its Scripture page.

Arrays & Linear Passes
The straight road through data.
Problems that are mostly about walking a list carefully: prefix sums, running counts, off-by-one traps, one-pass vs two-pass trade-offs.
See all array-based tales ↗
Two Pointers
Opposite forces working together.
Palindromes, pair sums, partitioning, compressing arrays in-place — anything where two indices dance toward or around each other.
Two-pointer stories ↗
Sliding Window
Fixed attention over moving data.
Maximum subarray sums, longest substring with constraints, rate limiting. Windows that grow, shrink, and track state on the fly.
Sliding window stories ↗
Greedy Strategies
Local decisions with global consequences.
Interval scheduling, activity selection, coin change variants, resource allocation — where “pick the best available now” either works perfectly or fails spectacularly.
Greedy pattern stories ↗
Hash Maps & Sets
Remembering things instantly.
Frequency counting, de-duplication, lookup tables, memoization — anything that feels like “I wish I could just check this in O(1)”.
Hash-powered stories ↗
Recursion & Backtracking
Echoes and reversible paths.
Recursive traversals, nested structures, decision trees, and search problems where you explore, undo, and try again.
Recursive & backtracking tales ↗
Trees & Hierarchies
Roots, branches, and visits.
Binary trees, N-ary trees, organisational charts, file systems — problems where structure is not flat but nested with relationships.
Tree-based stories ↗
Priority Queues & Heaps
What truly matters first.
Task scheduling, Dijkstra-style shortest paths, “top-k” queries, and every illusion of “urgent vs important” formalised as a structure.
Heap & priority stories ↗
Binary Search & Search Space Tricks
Finding the right threshold.
Classic sorted-array search plus “binary search on the answer”: capacity planning, minimum feasible value, tuning parameters.
Binary search stories ↗
Way 3
Browse by Real-World Situation

Sometimes you don’t care what the algorithm is called. You care that you’re fried, overwhelmed, or under pressure. These shelves group stories by the emotion or context they model.

Decision Overload & Too Many Options
Tales about crowded markets, packed schedules, and impossible choice sets — where the trick is to apply a rule, not to compare everything.
Stories for decision overload ↗
Focus, Attention, and Limited Energy
Sliding-window-style crises: juggling rituals, work, learning, and rest inside finite time. A mirror for your calendar chaos.
Stories about focus & time ↗
Urgency vs Importance
Burning bazaars and royal queues. When everything screams “now”, but only a few things actually determine whether the system survives.
Stories for priority conflicts ↗
Debugging, Panic, and Unknown Bugs
Situations where you don’t know what’s wrong yet — only that something is on fire. Good for building calm, systematic thinking under stress.
Stories for panic & bugs ↗
Exploration, Re-tries, and Changing Your Mind
Mazes, decision trees, and “regret caves” — where backtracking is not failure but the core mechanic of finding a viable path.
Stories for exploration & re-tries ↗
Identity, Confidence, and Skill Plateaus
Tales that aren’t about a single algorithm, but about becoming the kind of engineer who can face hard problems without freezing.
Stories for growth & doubt ↗
Under the Night Sky of Ideas

New shelves are added as the kingdom grows.

As more tales and scriptures arrive, they’ll be woven into these shelves — new arcs, new patterns, new situations. Join the scroll if you want to hear when a fresh crisis appears in your favourite corner of the map.

Occasional dispatches. High-signal only. No “daily grind” sermons.