Re:A computer science study plan to become a software engineer
by Jtsummers on Wednesday December 16, 2020 @03:45PM
(#25448363)
- For parsing, the difference between context free languages and regular languages. This has helped in a number of projects (usually at the clean up end).
- Boolean algebra has helped me greatly simplify hard to understand nested conditionals.
- Understanding data structures lets me pick the right ones for the problem.
- Algorithm analysis has let me take program runtimes from minutes or hours on modest data sets down to seconds or minutes.
- Discrete math topics helped me prove a problem that a coworker had spent a few weeks on was technically impossible.
- Again for parsing, understanding the ideas of parsing let me make a number of parsers over the years using a variety of mechanisms. The critical part, though, was understanding what was being parsed and how to parse so the code was clear. I replaced convoluted code with hardcoded values and assumptions about what would be in each part (line, or binary blob) with something more flexible and less hacky.
- Knowing how C stores data (stack versus heap) let me fix a lot of code from some engineer colleagues that would work, sometimes, but not reliably because they didn't understand how memory works.
- Boolean algebra has helped me greatly simplify hard to understand nested conditionals.
- Understanding data structures lets me pick the right ones for the problem.
- Algorithm analysis has let me take program runtimes from minutes or hours on modest data sets down to seconds or minutes.
- Discrete math topics helped me prove a problem that a coworker had spent a few weeks on was technically impossible.
- Again for parsing, understanding the ideas of parsing let me make a number of parsers over the years using a variety of mechanisms. The critical part, though, was understanding what was being parsed and how to parse so the code was clear. I replaced convoluted code with hardcoded values and assumptions about what would be in each part (line, or binary blob) with something more flexible and less hacky.
- Knowing how C stores data (stack versus heap) let me fix a lot of code from some engineer colleagues that would work, sometimes, but not reliably because they didn't understand how memory works.