Simplifying: Stacks and Queues

Stacks and queues: this is how I remember them:

Stacks: I picture something vertical: a pile of plates,a bottle.

Queues: I picture something horizontal: a pipe, a line (I join first, I get served first).

Stacks - LIFO:  you can only add(append, push) and remove(pop) from the back(top,end).
Queues - FIFO : add (enqueue,append) to the back(rear), only remove(dequeue,popleft) from the front .

LIFO : Last in, first out.
FIFO : first in, first out.

If you are JavaScript developer, you are unconsciously working with stacks and queues everyday:

• You use stacks every time you run your code: "function call stack".
• You use queues every time you run asynchronous code: "The event queue" of the event loop.

Here are some examples of stacks and queues in the real world:

Stack:

• Your favorite text editor: undo/redo feature.
• Backtracking: your browsers "back" button.
• Reverse : try to reverse your name.

Queue:

• Order processing: you stand 6 feet apart from everyone as you wait in line to place your order with a cashier.
• Message processing: your long SMS messages are stored in a queue( messages are sent in the order they are received). Test this feature out on twitter by exceeding your 143 character limit

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Now, how have you used stacks and queues consciously in your career?

Let's talk about your usage of these data structures or concepts in your projects.

• I coded a Java paint application to draw shapes on a canvas : https://github.com/moyarich/JPaint.

• I used the open source bull queue manager in my project to control the pace at which I send data to a API. Each subsequent item is sent to the API, after it connects to my webhook url. I wrote this custom function(https://gist.github.com/moyarich/4d6735b8d417c5e2f7e5f03469d32fb7)to get bull queue to manually process only one job in the queue on demand.