I recently learned about a trie data structure. While it may not be as widespread as arrays, hash tables, linked lists, or binary trees, there are applications where it excels. The main advantage of a trie is that you can search in constant time, regardless of how many elements it contains. This makes tries useful for autocomplete systems, spell checkers, dictionaries, and similar applications.

Quicksort is a curious algorithm. Many people learn it soon after the bubble sort because it can be easy to understand and code. Despite this, quicksort is widely used. For instance, Java comes with a dual-pivot implementation to sort arrays. Here, I want to dissect it step by step to cement my knowledge.

A couple of days ago, I took on an interesting task on Exercism. You can find the full description here. The goal is to create a function that takes a number between 1 and 31 and converts it to a list of actions. The sequence is defined by the five rightmost digits of the number when converted to binary. If you're unfamiliar with the binary system, I recommend reading this explanation first.

In this post, I'll discuss how I gradually improved my initial solution and share some interesting findings about the performance of different approaches.