Lara L. Schenck

Computing researcher, maker of monsters

Series: Computer Science Bootcamp

In this series, I document what I learn as I study for a big, hairy, white-boarding interview. While the effectiveness of interviewing style is certainly debatable, I did learn a lot!

  • Day 6: Algorithms – Sorting Algorithms in JavaScript

    Algorithms have got a bad, scary, rap. And you know what? It’s for good reason – understanding an algorithm is pretty doable, but implementing an algorithm in code of your own? It’s hard. I went through writing some common sorting algorithms in JavaScript with lots of help from the Internet. Take a read!

  • Calculating the binary search runs for 1000 items

    Day 5: Algorithms – Logarithms, Big-O, & Binary Search

    If I told my 16-year-old, art student self I’d be writing a blog post about logarithms, I wouldn’t have believed it. I’ve tried hard to avoid math for much of my life, yet here I am, not only learning about it but enjoying it! This post is an outline of what logarithms are and how…

  • A diagram of a hash table if people's names

    Day 4: Data Structures – I Made a Hash Table

    Apart from hashtags, my association with hashes is encrypting passwords in a database. That association is correct in terms of what a hash is, but there are also hash tables, hash functions, hash maps, and oh my gosh, more hash things for sure. Let’s focus on a hash function and a hash table and building…

  • Day 3: Data Structures – Stacks & Queues

    Stacks and queues are quite similar in that they are both linear and abstract data structures (meaning they describe the behavior of a different data structure, like a linked list or array). All the action in terms of adding and removing items happens at their ends, and their main difference is in which end that…

  • Drawing of a tree data structure

    Day 2: Data Structures – Trees!

    Day 2 of Data Structures…let’s talk about trees! What is a binary tree versus a binary search tree? Isn’t the DOM a tree? All of this and more!

  • Illustration of a linked list

    Day 1: Data Structures – Linked Lists

    Linked lists are very similar to arrays in that they are a one-dimensional list of elements. Unlike arrays, however, in a linked list, you cannot just jump to index 4, you have to walk through the list, starting with the “head”, or the first element in the list, and work your way through to the…

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  • Computer Science Bootcamp

    I’m studying up for a real-deal interview. There will be whiteboards. There will be coding questions much more involved than FizzBuzz. There will be algorithms and math and data structures and all of the things I have successfully avoided for much of my career. This is potentially a dream job, and if I put the…

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