2025-09-12 –, Ballroom 3
Follow my journey from drowning in the world of data structures to understanding through implementation. Skip Lists... What are they? Why are they? And how do they work? These are all questions I sought to answer after I discovered them in the wild. Come and find out why I think writing your data structures from scratch might be the best way to understand them.
As an intern, I frequently come across things I don't really understand - one of these things was a Skip List. After my boss tried to explain what it was several times and I googled it, I was still super lost. Around the same time, I was in a class at my uni called Data Structures and Algorithms. The first assignment for this class was to recreate a hash set from scratch with all its capabilities in C++, and I found that it really deepened my understanding, so I planned to use this idea to understand how Skip Lists work and why they are useful. My first step was to make a linked list Class, as this was something I already deeply understood, and then I could use this object as the basis for other data structures. Next, I recreated my assignment, building off my linked list so that I could practice how this may work in Python. Then I felt ready to finally make a Skip List and understand why my boss wanted to use it in his code.
2nd year Software Engineering student. Long-time Pythonista and tech lover. Mild Caffeine addict.