I’ve put some code exercises on GitHub. They are the absolute basics; data structures for graphs and sorting algorithms. The stuff you would learn if you formally studied Computer Science - which I did not. In the end, a very worthwhile endeavour.

I’ll admit frustration at the beginning - that is to say the first couple of days. Once I got the ball rolling, however, it felt good to work on and so I am happy to share. Specifically, the power of pathfinding algorithms like A* is truly awesome. It has such obvious abundance in a variety of real world applications that even a naive implementation is fun to play with. It made me think of the turn based strategy games of my youth.

I was really looking forward to using the new JavaScript syntax available in ES6’s to write these in. However most implementations, as of this writing, have only a subset of the proposed syntax implemented. Additionally I’ve caught wind of some disagreements on the spec itself. Hey, at least JavaScript is evolving again after over a 10 year hiatus since a major release.

In the end I’m using node.js/v8 so I have trim little executables.

A final note to this post was realizing how useful the Struct and OpenStruct classes in Ruby truly are. They essentially function as tuples. I should be encouraged to use them and create my own arbitrary structures more willingly instead of forcing data into a specific pattern. After all the language creators built flexibility into their standard libraries for a reason.