Every CS student learns quicksort, mergesort, and heapsort. Then they go to work and discover that nobody actually uses textbook sorts anymore. Python uses Timsort. Rust uses pdqsort. C++ uses introsort. JavaScript uses Timsort. The 'best' sorting algorithm in 2026 is hybrid, adaptive, and exploits patterns in real data that uniform-random benchmarks never showed.
Engineering Craft
TypeScript, CI/CD, databases, observability -- the skills that make code production-ready.
