Java Full Stack Development with Data Structures — East West College of Engineering, Bangalore
5-day East West College sprint: morning DSA problem blocks (arrays, strings, trees, graphs intro), afternoon Spring Boot + React integration labs, timed coding drills, evening code reviews, and a mini-hack presentation.
Java Full Stack Development with Data Structures Workshop — East West College of Engineering, Bangalore
Duration: 5 consecutive days (high intensity)Daily shape: DSA block → Java/Spring lab → React integration touchpoint → review & leaderboard debriefCover (placeholder): /images/workshops/eastwest-java-dsa.jpg
Why combine DSA with full stack in five days?
Campus hiring loops often alternate between: (a) can you solve structured problems under time pressure and (b) can you ship readable code in a framework? This workshop explicitly trained context switching— the cognitive skill of moving from algorithmic mode to framework mode within the same day.
DSA curriculum spine (representative difficulty)
| Focus | Topics | Practice style |
|---|---|---|
| Arrays & strings | two pointers, sliding window, prefix sums | 45-min timed sets |
| Stacks & queues | monotonic stack intro, BFS layering | pair debugging |
| Trees | traversals, height, path problems | whiteboard → code |
| Graphs | adjacency list, DFS/BFS, cycle intuition | one guided grid problem |
| Hashing & heaps | frequency maps, top-K patterns | complexity discussion after each |
Complexity language was enforced: participants labelled every solution with time & space before optimisation talk.
Java / Spring afternoon labs (cumulative)
- Day 1–2: Build a small REST service exposing endpoints that mirror DSA “query” operations (e.g., range sum API backed by prefix array)- Day 3: Add persistence for leaderboard + user attempts (simple schema)- Day 4: Introduce authentication gate protecting “admin reset” endpoint- Day 5: Hardening hour: validation, global errors, and a 5-minute demo rehearsal
React touchpoints (kept intentionally thin but real)
- Leaderboard table with loading skeletons- Form for submitting “daily challenge” outcomes with optimistic UI toggle lab
Code quality rituals we enforced
- Pre-submit checklist: null safety, edge cases named aloud, variable names that read as prose- 10-minute peer review swap before mentor review- Retro: what slowed you down—reading spec, debugging, or translating idea to code?
Placement tie-ins
- Mapping each solved problem to a story suitable for “Tell me about a challenging bug” prompts- One session on Big-O communication in interviews (talking while thinking)- Cheat-sheet pack: complexity table, Java collections complexity, Spring stereotype annotations
Mini-capstone (Day 5 PM)
Teams picked a toy optimisation story (e.g., caching repeated queries) and presented:
- Problem framing- Approach A vs B trade-offs- What they would measure in production
Prerequisites
Students should have solved basic array problems beforehand; otherwise Day 1 morning is steep. Laptops with JDK 21+ and Node 20+ pre-installed avoided setup drag.
Seed content for demonstration.