Not long ago, I spent a month learning the basics on how algorithms and data structures work and their practical use in our daily programming lives for a recent job application for one of the top software companies down under.
In the first place, I never truly appreciate how and why they are important to learn. After working with some startups, agencies and consulting firms for several years, a lot of things I did in my previous work never once find one or two things that data structures and algorithms would come in handy when solving difficult business problems. The mere thought of having to know them is nothing more but boring computer science fundamentals which bear no relevance in today’s modern computing age where technologies are evolving at rapid pace. With today’s computers’ raw computing power such as CPU, memory and speed took care by technology vendors that make such great advances, we never need to worry about making optimizations in our code.