Welcome to the Base.cs Podcast for we explore the basics of computer science concepts. I'm your host Saron, founder of CodeNewbie, and I'm Vite Hijoji, author and developer, and she is the brilliant mind behind the Base.cs blog series. Today we're talking about the show, this show actually. This season of Base.cs is brought to you by DevDiscus. DevDiscus is a show I work on with the team at Dev, an international supportive community for developers.
The show addresses the many burning topics that pop up on Dev every day, and is hosted by Jess Lee and Ben Helper, two of Dev's co-founders. Past episodes have included unpopular opinions with Kelsey Haetower, staff developer advocate at Google Cloud and the legendary voice in tech. So unpopular opinion should be like, computers were a mistake. Was this all worth it? And how changing her name is a difficult, unsolved and sometimes personally devastating problem in tech.
I basically walk through this world through this minefield of not knowing when I'm going to have this like, sort of deep emotional wound reopened. As well as how little known tools can have big productivity gains. And I think it gives me the sense of structure which I really enjoy, and also you can color code different things. Each episode features interesting guests from diverse backgrounds who are active in the software space.
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It's been three years. I feel like it's been longer actually, but it's been three years. And I am so happy with how the show came out. Buddy, are you happy with how the show came out to the right answers? Yes. Very happy. Okay. I feel like we've just gotten, we've gotten so much great feedback over the years. And you know, it's been nine seasons. And I remember in the beginning, we really weren't sure if anyone's going to like it or anyone's going to listen. This was even a good idea.
And people have just been so nice. Like our listeners are great. And I just want to thank them all for sticking with us and tuning in and like tweeting at us and telling us they liked it and asking us for stickers. It's been great. Yeah, I mean, we've had such great support on the show since the very beginning. I'm our first announcing it and being like, oh, okay. This wasn't a bad idea. That is great. Because it's risky. You know, like I think it's risky putting out a new show period.
But then I think it's doubly risky when you're like, I'm going to teach you computer science, something that's usually very visual. And hope that people can still follow along and still get value from it. So it was a relatively risky show. And I'm glad it turned out well. I remember like when the first episode came out and we saw like the downloads, we were like, whoa. Yeah, people like it. Oh, no, they're doing it. But it's been really fun. Our friendship has grown a lot and like it has.
We make a lot of nerdy jokes. It's good. Yeah, good times. We have good chemistry. We have good banter. Okay. Okay, so we put out a call on Twitter for all of you to send us any burning questions you might have about the show. So we got a couple that we wanted to share. The first one is from Brent M. Clark. And Brent writes, I don't recall ever hearing how you do met. Tell us your origin story. Good question, Brent.
That is a great question because I don't know if I know the answer to this is getting down to a nitty gritty. How did we, I think we met on Twitter first, right? I think we came to know of each other maybe on Twitter, but like I knew of you back when I was sort of starting out my career because you and I both went to the same coding bootcamp way back in the day. But we met in person at a conference in Chicago. And I think that's when we were like, oh, yeah, we're friends now.
But we're friends from afar. We're officially friends. We were friends from afar for like a while because I think because we went to both ones of the flyer and school and I think you graduated the cohort after me or couple cohorts like a year or a couple of course after you. Okay, okay. Okay. Because I remember we had that kind of remember when I was first introduced to you that was like the connection that we had. Yeah. And then I think there's somewhere like an audio format or video format.
You talk about how like you saw a base CS and you were like, okay, she really going to do this. Like I just like, hmm, okay, let's make a podcast together. That's exactly how it went. That's how the show was born. Yeah, I was like, that's a really because I've always wanted to do something a little bit more educational with the podcast because I love radio lab. You know that show that well, now they do kind of everything.
But they used to be a very science focused show and they would teach all these really intimidating scientific topics and they would do it in an audio format. And then I worked so well and I was like, man, I really want to do that for coding. And then I saw your like declaration of weekly blogging for a year and I was like, whoa, that's intense. But then you did it and I was like, oh, maybe this is like the thing we can take and do like the radio lab for coding. You know, so yeah, it worked out.
Yeah. That's the origin story. All right. Now we have Jade Dickinson who writes, what is your favorite niche data structure? That word niche is kind of throwing me off. I don't know what's considered niche. I guess like fancy. I'm thinking of it like I'm pretty basic. I don't know. I'm a pretty basic person. My favorite is trees. I love trees. That's pretty basic. Hey, they're important. It's very uninteresting answer to that question. What about you? What's your favorite?
I like red black trees just because they're like, oh, that is fancy. I mean, I just feel like they're like so odd because they're like, oh, you could only use these two colors. And there's like an interesting history behind it and people, if you like went up to someone you were like, I love red black trees, they'd be like, what? Why? And I guess that makes it niche. Yeah. I'm okay with that. I'm totally good with that answer. Yeah. All right.
We have Lori Nex to ask during the course of the podcast and all the topics you focused on, how has it changed your views about what knowledge and skills are necessary for being a successful coder? That's a good question. I want to hear your answer to this first. Me first. Yeah. Okay. It has taught me, this is going to be really bad, but that's okay. It's a last episode. It doesn't even matter. It's taught me that you do not need computer science to do coding and to be a successful coder at all.
Yeah. Thank you. I'm glad you saved that for this episode. You do not need to know any of this stuff. Well, because I feel like every time we go through this topic and we learn some new concept and we have this whole story around it and you do an amazing job explaining it. And then one of my last questions is almost always great. How do we use this in real life and your answer is almost always we already do. We just don't have to think about it. And I'm like, okay, cool. So that was useless.
Okay. Moving on. But do you know what I mean? Like it felt like it was great just for my own intellectual curiosity. But in terms of like, do I need it to be a better developer? Yeah. Not really. That was my take. That was my takeaway. What about yours? Interesting. So for me, whenever we get into a certain topic, you're right. We would sort of end the conversation a lot of the times being like, okay, so where can we see this in real life?
Like, where is it actually used? And you're right that I would also sometimes say like you may not even have to think about this. But there are also times where I would give an example, like, I'm like thinking of like the, you know, Google's auto complete or like what a stack overflow is and like how that relates to something. I remember a various examples where the way that something was used was something that I worked with every day.
And it was cool to see the data structures of the algorithms that were powering it because then suddenly it was a little bit demystified because it wasn't suddenly like, oh, I don't know how you'd build that or I don't know how this works. I don't want to say about it. But it was empowering to know that the things that were, you know, making that thing work, making that concept go.
They weren't like magic. They weren't that hard actually because in the span of 25 minutes, we usually were able to like cover all the basic concepts of how something actually functioned. I think it's empowering in that you don't need to do this every day. But a lot of the times these concepts can be used as like a, oh, you don't know about it.
Oh, well, you don't really like know any computer science. You really know coding and it's like, well, you don't need to know it every day. But like the minute that the two things connect, you have that light bulb moment where you're like, oh, that's how that works. It was this data structure the whole time. And then it's not scary anymore. And so I would just like to say I still have never used a link list in my life in my, you know, six year career or whatever.
But it's cool when I like run into it. And I'm like, hey, I know what that is. I'm not scared of it. I know what you look like. I know how you work. And I know it can handle you. So that's always a, that makes me feel confident. And that's probably just makes me successful coder in general.
I like that. Even though the actual knowledge itself, you may not be applying on a regular basis. The fact that you have that knowledge gives you the confidence that then translates to being a successful coder totally. I like that. Good answer. All right. Next we have Ali. Teration. Hopefully I'm saying that right. Relatoration says, oh my God. Is that is that what that's supposed to be? I have to assume so. Is it a literal show?
Because it's great. That is amazing. Thank you so much for being named that. That is wonderful. Okay. So a littleeration said for people who have listened to all the episodes and want to keep learning what are some good resources to check out next, which is actually very similar to Tony Gorez who asked what is the best path for a self taught developer to learn data structure and algorithms.
So just school courses, websites, etc. Those are pretty similar. So how would you answer those? I would say there's probably a few different approaches for how to keep learning. First, you can start by finding other resources that sort of cater to your learning style. For me, that's often like a book or videos or something very visual. People who are listening to this podcast are probably auditory learners or at least learn somewhat auditory auditory. I don't know the word.
Really? Oh, great. I have no idea. Yeah, I think I think understanding how you learn and then finding resources that cater to that is probably the best first step. If you like books, I will just sort of tease that maybe maybe there are some things, some projects that I am working on and stay tuned. Maybe there will be more resources in the future after base. Yes, the podcast finishes.
There's also a great book called Grocking Algorithms. That's very visual and illustrated that focuses just on algorithms, which is really fun. I think that I would say is like aside from finding resources, I think it can really help to sort of dig deep into one concept that you already know a little bit about or you're interested in. So like maybe that's a data structure. Maybe that's like how compilers work.
And just sort of digging deep into it is going to teach you a lot and you'll learn a lot of other related things along the way. Sometimes that might mean trying to implement a data structure or algorithm. That's a great way of learning the building blocks of how something works. And sometimes that could mean finding examples of a data structure or algorithm in a language or a framework that you use every day.
Maybe you go look at the source code of it and then you learn more about the practical aspects of using it or implementing it. But I guess the other thing you can also do in addition to all those things is you can try teaching or explaining what you've learned so far to someone else, which surprise surprise is literally what we've been doing for three years on this podcast. But I think this was actually my secret way of getting a free CS degree. That's really all.
It comes out. Yeah, it's like a filial admit a do. I think you have an honor. You know what you have you have a base CS degree. There we go. You don't need a CS degree. You got a base CS degree. That's like a great sticker idea. Too bad I'm realizing this in the last episode. Yeah, I've kind of do it. Kind of miss the vote on that.
But my point is like you learn a lot and you'll get better at a lot of these things if you teach them to other people and explain them to other people because when you don't know something, it'll be pretty evident when you're trying to teach it that you don't know it or you'll, you know, run across something and be like, oh, actually, I don't know the answer. Let me look it up or let's look it up together.
And I think that's that's always a really good way of getting better at something, especially if you're self taught because you're improving your own knowledge and you're teaching somebody else along the way. And then our last question comes from app develops. I read that as like developing your abs like your physical abs, which I don't know, you know, which is pretty pretty cool. Good job. They asked, will there be a base DS podcast? You want to share what base DS is?
Yeah. So base DS is the series I worked on in 2019. So 2017 is when I wrote base CS and then a couple of years later, I wrote base DS. And that's uncovering the basics of distributed systems instead of computer science. So shout out to app developers. And it worked out like name wise. I know something else. That's amazing. Someone have to keep going. Yeah, someone tweeted me and they were like, what's going to be base ES? And I'm like, hang on, man. I need a year off. No projects this year.
But yeah, shout out to app develops for knowing about base DS. That's great. If any, that's actually a great shout out to any listeners. If you like computer science and you know, you've liked the show and you want to learn something that's sort of related, but also extremely different. Check out base DS because distributed systems is sort of like taking everything you know about computer science. Sort of throwing it out the window and then turning it on its head.
Because instead of one machine, you have a whole bunch of machines and things get really wild, but it's fun. And it's like a thousand tons. Yeah, yeah. It's a lot of cool concepts, but sometimes they can really make your head hurt. But anyways, to answer that question, will there be a base DS podcast. We are not working on one right now. I think saran and I both need some time off. Well, break it be nice. Yeah, but you know, it's been three years. Never say never.
Yeah, what are we going to talk about? Oh, so now we're going to shift gears and we're going to look back at the last few years. And specifically, we're going to look at some of our favorite moments. So both of us have put a list together of our favorite moments from the base DS podcast. And we found that there's like, there's few common themes that come up again and again. So we kind of want to strengthen together for you as a nice little farewell. Yeah, what's our first theme?
The first theme is children. Very cool. So we have D, which we're going to leave alone because it has many children. So it doesn't violate any rules. Yeah, babies many, many. It was busy. Yeah, it's like the theme of just making babies just always sponsored by my mom. Oh, my goodness. Because we can work our way up for swallowing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is like some childhood of times. And at Earth, not times where, you know, the parent eats the child something diverse to them. I don't know.
Something's right. Something about clubs and don't let parents eat. I've been watching a lot of nature documentaries recently. In case you haven't noticed, I can tell. If you delete the root node, well, the moment you do that, you've automatically violated an important rule, which is that now you don't have a heap. Right. I was kind of pausing waiting for. I was like, what's the wrong? Well, you took away the root node like what now all the children are parents.
Oh, wait, they're not parents. They're orphaned. They have no parents. They're orphaned. Oh, I'm so sorry. Let's just take a moment to appreciate the fact that we've really done nothing. We just came. We just met like the baby, baby of the family. That's all we've done. We're like, oh, hello. I'm imagining, I'm imagining someone like trying to have a conversation with the parent and the parents like, I don't have time to talk to you, but here's my child.
And then the child is like, I also don't have time to talk to you. Here's my other child. And that child's like, I also don't have time to talk to you. Here's my, and then the final child is like, I don't have any children. You're just holding an infant by the end. Yeah. Yeah. I have to know what I was here for. Can I just say how much I appreciate the diversity of topics within the topic of children?
There's eating children. There's orphan children. There's random infants. There's big handed around. There's, yes, I mean, we've done a really good job of just covering all the bases for the different ways you could talk about children. I just want to put out a disclaimer. No children were harmed in the recording broadcast. We do not facilitate this or condone this. It's just unfortunate because trees. Trees really have a lot of children. Children met a force. Yeah.
It's not a fault. We couldn't help it. We had to. Those were the rules. Okay, so another theme that has come up a lot is food. They make algorithms seem really hard because now you suddenly have all these little boxes you have to check off. So it's like if I told you to make brownies, but then I'm like, don't use this type of flower and make sure your chocolate chips are, you know, this size and, you know, the oven.
If it's above 350, well, that's inefficient. Like, you know, like all these crazy qualifications and you're like, I just want to make brownies. Don't you just combine stuff and it's like, yeah, you can make brownies 500 ways, but we're trying to find the best brownie.
But when it's time for me to get that awesome pepperoni that I can say, hey fridge operator, where is it? And it uses it's whatever little magical system thingy to go find it much quicker than it would for me to go through the fridge myself.
And try and find it exactly the idea. Yes, that's that's a great. Yeah, it's a great way of summarizing like hashing function like they send them out for bacon and then they come back and then they're like send them out for bacon and they come back and then they're just perpetually stuck going out for bacon because and then, you know, the chef never gets the bacon.
Yeah, all the rest so much bacon everywhere just never being just never being resolved or returning in any place like it's just it's just bacon galore. Ooh, I like the past the baton. You like the baton? Yeah, it's like that's great. It's like because you can only in this family this tree. Only one person can speak at once, which means you can only be looking at one note at once, which is a baton. That's great.
Yeah, think about all the family barbecue so it's so much more organized if there's only one baton. You know, you know, you have to talk over each other. Oh, that too. I love how you're thinking about like communication and you know relationship building and I'm just thinking about food. Both important. Yup, always thinking about food. I love that bacon one by the way, like that was a good one.
I feel like that episode I can't I think we're talking about stack overflows, but I remember like you were talking about the bacon thing and you're like. There was just like you can hear it in the clip. There's such despair in your voice. You're like what he was just keep going out and they're the chef would never get the bacon and what would happen. I was like, yeah, that's like a stack overflow. And you're like, no, but the bacon. Priorities by these priorities.
I also realize that most of our food references are not like vegan friendly at all. Yeah, like we talked about pepperoni and hot dogs and bacon. I know we did one about cheeseburgers too. I remember like a cheeseburger one. So yeah, not very healthy. And then the brownies like we're just we're not definitely not dieting. No. Well, aside from children and food, I think there's any one thing that you come away with from this podcast.
I hope that it's the knowledge of this one specific thing that computers are really good at. And I'm going to let this clip speak for itself. Okay, so that's like if my process is running on a treadmill and I'm like maximum speed and all the buttons aren't working because I have to finish my 10 minutes of jogging. But then I really, really have to pee. I can't just stop running and then pee and then go back to running. So I like pee on myself. Or I have no choice.
Or what actually you probably do is you're going to pull that red you know that red button or that string where it's like the treadmill just stops. And then you go do the other thing. It's like kind of like a stack overflow where it's like the process cannot continue anymore. And I don't have my stats. I don't know. My heartbeat was like all it just shuts down.
It's all better than than paying on yourself. That's a better way to explain that computers have been have been highly trained to not pee on themselves. That is very good. That is a good one. I don't know how we got there from that. I don't know how we got. I'm trying to. I'm trying to remember like what was the start of that conversation to get to where we got to. And I have no idea how we ended up on a treadmill having to pee on ourselves. I don't know how we got there.
But we found a way. Yeah, we always find a way. And finally we want to leave you with one of the most important things that came out of this show, which is Vitee's beautiful song about Dijkstra's algorithm. Oh, no. And it goes a little something like this. Dijkstra's algorithm. Dijkstra's algorithm. Everyone thinks that it's so hard. But really, it's just fun. Dijkstra's algorithm. That's it, Vitee. That's like the worst song ever. I know. You don't even write anything. I know.
I mean, there's a melody. It's funny because after I heard it, I was thinking literally the same thing. I was like, this is the worst song ever. Well, I would just like to say that the message of that song actually I feel like applies to this whole series. I feel like it could be the base CS podcast long because don't worry. I'm not going to sing it again. But I do feel like, you know, everybody thinks it's so hard. All these concepts are so hard and intimidating.
But if you have the right friend to learn with you, it doesn't have to be hard. It can be fun. That's true. And you had two friends you had, Vitee and me. Yeah. Okay. Well, since you said it, I think we have to. Can you please sing the base CS song? I'll try. I think the melody is going to be weird. I'll try. That's okay. You could do it. I believe in you. All right. Base CS podcast. The base CS podcast. Everyone thinks computer science is so hard. But it's really just fun. The base CS podcast.
And that's a wrap, friends. And that's the end of today's show. If you like what you heard, please leave us a review and make sure to check out Vitee's blog posts. Link to that is in the show notes. Also, make sure to take a listen to the Dev Discuss podcast that I help make. It's the first original podcast from Dev, a global community, a software developer, a software developer of all backgrounds and experience levels.
And the show covers burning topics that impact the daily lives of programmers and beyond. Hosted by Dev co-founders Ben Halpern and Jess Lee. This episode was edited and mixed by Levi Sharp. Bye, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed the show. It's like a little finicky, like a cat, you know, where like, I don't want to pet it unless it's tail is up. Is that how cats work? I don't know. It's about to ask you. Is that what I do?
I know there's a certain time where if a cat's tail is up, you do or don't want to pet it. One of them means they're happy and the other one is like, hey, go away. Anyways, keeps our cats or cats or heaps. What if you had a heap of cats? That seems hard.