I did a ½ presentation ½ discussion on data structures for our web developer team.
Where I work developers come from different backgrounds and not everyone has a computer science vocabulary. It was interesting trying to talk about data structures without cheating by using CS jargon. It was surprising how much I depend on having a shared specialized language when discussing algorithms and data structures. They weren’t joking when they said the easiest way to learn something is to explain it to someone else.
I only had 1.5 hours, so it was tricky fitting in everything I wanted to go over with enough time to discuss each slide. My goal was to persuade people to use ES6’s new Map() and Set() data structures instead of arrays when appropriate. We are also planning to increase the amount we use Immutable.js with React so I accepted to give a hand-wavey explanation of persistent data structures.
I should have spent more time the persistent data structure section. I think people got that we can check for changes in constant time (by reference equality) but I don’t think I did a great job of giving people a rough idea of how the internal bookkeeping works.
An infinite amount of time to fact check my slides would also have been nice :-).