Code and Coffee September 19, 2018

Here in Grand Rapids a few of us regularly get together over coffee and talk about code.

 Here is a report that I sent back to our slack group to tell about what we did and I thought it might be good to share it here so I can point people somewhere when they ask what it is about:

 Code & Coffee was pretty epic this morning. I talked so much it took nearly three hours to finish my sandwich. The theme of today turned out to be Algorithms. We started talking about Codepen.io, and ACE editor which somehow go onto the topic of algorithms which it turns out we have both been brushing up on in the last few weeks.

We did light coverage a couple of sorting algorithms insertion and selection sorts) going through my notes and a run through of each on some sample data. Talked about the runtime ( O(n^2) ) then we talked about other sorting including 3 way quick sort which can get to linearithmic time with certain (likely) key distributions. (Also quick sort works well with modern caching architectures which is a free bonus performance boost)

 Then we wandered off into linked lists and doubly linked lists, heaps and binary search trees. Finishing up with finding the middle of a linked list in one pass. All in all it was a good discussion @Othelle allowed me to practice talking about the things made notes on and hopefully it was at least entertaining for him if not educational too.

 Links: https://codepen.io/
https://ace.c9.io/
http://www.algorist.com/
https://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/home/

Somewhere along the line we talked about Conway’s Game of Life
here are two implementations I did (one only gets partial credit: https://github.com/Hopasaurus/GameOfLife  (in C# partially done, check the commits for the interesting bit of this)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT7b59CmUjk  (in C for Arduino, code on request if I can find it back)


Also my (one) post for last year was a somewhat related topic: http://blog.hopasaurus.com/2017/10/tail-recursion-considered-harmful.html