Most balanced search trees -- red-black, AVL, B-trees -- are clever and complicated. Skip lists give you the same O(log n) operations with code an undergraduate could write, using nothing but linked lists and a coin flip. Redis uses them for sorted sets. LevelDB uses them for the memtable. Once you see the trick, the elegance is hard to forget.
Engineering Craft
TypeScript, CI/CD, databases, observability -- the skills that make code production-ready.
