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During a recent job interview, I was asked to share a brief account of how I fell in love with coding. The question made me reflect on my journey, and while it may be a familiar story, I believe it's worth documenting.

A Glimpse into My Early Years: My interest in the IT industry began at a young age. From the age of seven, I was surrounded by technology and became curious about how different devices worked – especially the components like CPUs and GPUs. I started tinkering with hardware early on, from the ZX Spectrum to more modern systems. By the time I was fourteen, I was already assembling my own PCs.

When preparing for a job interview, one of the tasks I encountered was a problem that emphasized proficiency in the C programming language and data structures. The task, which you can find [here]({{ site.github.owner_url }}/concordance#concordance), revolved around efficient search and insertion operations for key-value pairs. The keys, unique words extracted from an input document, needed to map to an array of line numbers in the document where the word appeared. Given the frequent need for search and insert operations, it was evident that hash tables would be the ideal data structure for this task, boasting an average and amortized case complexity of O(1).