Cover Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash
Pursuing a career in Software Engineering is a lot of work. I get a lot of advice from different angles that i...
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Great post. What resources have you used that have enlightened you or made the topic exciting?
Great first post
Nice one! Other reasons, besides performance: correctness of implementations and better readability for others as the design is based on common knowledge.
Thanks. I see how that helps, especially when working in teams.
Thanks for the post. I've learned those last year but your post made me realise that I don't see myself using them in my job (well, apart from basic algorithms of course). So I'll dive more into DS & A and see if things I've coded could be improved.
Thanks for sharing this Linda, I have also been learning DS & A and I have realised a lot of my old code wasn't efficient because I used to just do the brute force method. DS & A has really helped in writing better efficient algorithms
Well, I would say: "it depends".
Depend on what? you might ask. Well, I'm a web developer for quite some time now, programming for even longer, and I rarely had to focus on algorithms to make my code more efficient.
Why? Because our hardware is so powerful nowadays, it doesn't matter if I do a bubble sort O(n^2) or a marge sort O(n).
So it depends of what you're doing. For web apps, what many people do, having this knowledge is not required to me. On the other side, if you work for the NASA or you code video games, you need to know that, and much more.
I'm trying to learn computer science at the moment, and I love it. Because I have some experience in development beforehand. It brings me some interesting foundations.
I wouldn't advise it to beginners though: it's difficult, if you're a Javascript developer for a small startup you won't necessarily see the application in your daily work, and you already need to manage so much only for your code to work, more or less, to maintain it, and to understand the code of others, among many other things.
Thanks a lot Linda. This was a great read. I have mulling over why I should learn DS & A and after reading this, it has become quite clear to me. What material would you recommend please?
I recommend starting out with videos on Big-O notation. It would put you more in the mood and open your eyes to how terrible the code we write is (had that effect on me).
Thanks. I'll do that
Awesome post! Thanks for encouraging me to study those more.
This is a great post. I love it!!
Enjoyed reading the topic, currently, I have an introduction to DS&A, and after reading your topic I am more motivated.
and then you a left with itching question whether it should be an array in the first place :)
😂😂 yeah should it be a linked list or a tree?! More nuances to it all.
That's a great reason to study Data Structures & Algorithms. I'm a self-taught front-end dev as well and your article provided more clarity on the subject as well as nudging me to dig in.