> something around DFS and/or topological sorting (without calling it by name, of course), because those are thing which you might actually need to implement at work: people sometimes traverse JSONs, and people sometimes resolve dependencies. No one has ever told me "oh, I know this problem, it's DFS", because surely I know they know it.
Well, I've been coding for 15 years (of course walking through data structures, JSON being one of the simplest), hung around HN and did interview puzzles a bunch, and yet have no idea what you mean by DFS nor ever needed to write a topological sorting implementation. No need to explain, I'll look it up for the fomo, but just to show that there's always experienced people who just didn't happen to come across something you say you've needed only on rare occasions ('something you might need')
Edit: oh ok, DFS is just depth-first search. Walking a tree. Okay yeah sure I can do that but it seems (from my security PoV) about as common to write tree parsers and sorting algorithms as designing a new cryptographic protocol, that is: hard avoid, rarely necessary
Well, I've been coding for 15 years (of course walking through data structures, JSON being one of the simplest), hung around HN and did interview puzzles a bunch, and yet have no idea what you mean by DFS nor ever needed to write a topological sorting implementation. No need to explain, I'll look it up for the fomo, but just to show that there's always experienced people who just didn't happen to come across something you say you've needed only on rare occasions ('something you might need')
Edit: oh ok, DFS is just depth-first search. Walking a tree. Okay yeah sure I can do that but it seems (from my security PoV) about as common to write tree parsers and sorting algorithms as designing a new cryptographic protocol, that is: hard avoid, rarely necessary