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Have you ever got stuck on a coding problem? Maybe you're implementing a feature on one of your projects, maybe you're solving puzzles for something like Advent of Code, and you get stuck.

You just can't figure out how to get the result you need. So you head over to Stack Overflow, or Reddit, or ask a colleague for help, and you get an answer like "oh, that's easy, just use Dijkstra's algorithm"... and your brain crashes. Use what? So you go and look it up and discover it's for "finding the shortest paths between nodes in a weighted graph", and now you've got to look up what a "node" is, and what a "weighted graph" is... and then figure out how to turn all that into working code? Nightmare.

Well, it doesn't have to be like that. Algorithms are the key to all kinds of features and systems, from networks to autocorrect, and understanding how they work will help you build better software, fix subtle bugs - and solve Advent of Code. In this talk, we'll meet some of his favourite algorithms, explain why they're important, and help you understand what they do, and how they do it.

NDC Conferences

A comprehensive exploration of fundamental algorithms through practical examples and visualizations. Covers sorting algorithms (bubble sort, quick sort, merge sort, insertion sort), search algorithms, Dijkstra's pathfinding algorithm, and the Levenshtein distance for spell checking. Explains Big O notation, recursion, time complexity, and space complexity using accessible analogies like pub crawls and Scrabble games. Emphasizes understanding algorithmic concepts while advocating for using battle-tested library implementations rather than rolling your own.

Algorithms Demystified - Dylan Beattie - NDC Copenhagen 2025