Built by one person, for everyone learning DSA.
Hi — I'm Sai Ram Kasanagottu. I built FaangDeck during my PhD because "grind 300 LeetCode problems and the patterns will emerge" fails most people who don't have six months to spare.
About me
I'm a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Stony Brook University. Before grad school I was a Tech Lead Engineer at Saama Technologies (Pune); my Bachelor's and Master's are from IIT Kharagpur. Most of my published research is in computer vision and deep-learning model optimization, but I've been coaching friends through these interviews for ten years — long enough to know what people get stuck on.
I'm not an ex-FAANG engineer with a side hustle. I'm a CS researcher building the textbook I wish existed. Different posture: I care about whether you actually learned a pattern, not whether the explanation looks defensible on a Twitter thread.
I'm a full-time PhD student. I'm not running this as a business and I'm not collecting payment. FaangDeck stays free — no signup, no paywall, works offline. If it helps, share it with one friend who's prepping. That's the whole exchange.
How FaangDeck teaches DSA
Most DSA prep treats every problem as an isolated puzzle. You learn how to solve Two Sum, but never how to recognize that a problem wants a hashmap. So you grind, and you still freeze on novel problems.
FaangDeck is built around recognition first, problem-solving second. Every lesson opens with three Pattern Recognition signals — verbal or structural cues in the problem statement that point to exactly one technique. Then a canonical template. Then a deliberate trap (the bug everyone hits first). Then the adapted solution, a trace, complexity, and a two-slide Interview Playbook for what to say in the room.
Same 24-slide skeleton on every problem. After 5–6 lessons you stop reading the headings and start absorbing the pattern.
What's in it: 217 lessons across 19 topics organised into a 6-phase path. Covers the full Blind 75, NeetCode 150, and Grind 75 problem sets, plus extras across DP, Graphs, Backtracking, Matrix patterns, and Bit Manipulation. 1,503 quiz questions and 1,052 flashcards for active recall. Full-text search. Reader Mode + Sepia theme. Offline-first PWA.
Find me
For bug reports + content corrections: the in-app feedback form (anonymous by default). For everything else: [email protected].