Adam Liu

Data structures are some of the most foundamental topics in computer science. So whatever your focus in computer science is, you need to study them. VisuAlgo helps with this painstaking process by visualizing the data strctures and their corresponding algorithms using easy-to-understand graphics. Use one of the built-in classic scenarios (e.g. inserting in an unbalanced binary tree) or create your own data structure or graphs so that you can see how that one data strucure that always confuses you works. It also has a e-Lecture mode, which allows you to learn about a data strucutre before visualizing it. Very handy if you are tutoring (or lecturing!) for a computer science class.

All machine learning models require huge amounts of data. However, as beginners, we do not have access to real-world datasets on a large scale like Google. Kaggle provides us with a place to share real datasets so everyone can make their own models. In addition to datasets, Kaggle is also a competition platform, where data scientists from around the world can compete on making the best model: who can recognize this image dataset better? Which group has the highest accuracy in recognizing speech? These competitions make Kaggle not only a website for downloading datasets, but also a place to socialize with fellow data scientists.

One set of code, built using web technologies, runs on both iOS and Android with minimum setup. Sounds too good to be true? These are all possible with React native, a cross-platform framework built upon the popular React.js. The React native official site is a surprisingly informative place with documentations, development blogs, and my favorite page -- a step-by-step starter tutorial that guides you from environment setup to your first React native app. So if you are interested, give it a try!

If you are remotely familiar with coding in general, this really is a site that needs no introduction. For the non-coding people, Stackoverflow is a forum for all things coding related. If you have a problem, any problem, during coding, from install a programming language environment to centering an image on a web page, there's probablya thread on Stackoverflow that addresses your question. It is for the same reason that some developers call 'not being able to find people with the same problem on Stackoverflow' their biggest fear.

On the surface, Github is just an online code repository, like a Google Drive for your code. As it develops throughout the years, it became a place where people from around the world can socialize and collaborate on a single project. Today, it still stands at the forefront of open-source software. Many popular technologies, including the framework that this site is based on, are developed by people from different backgrounds on Github. In my opinion, it's one of the most important sites in democratizing software.

Leetcode, one of the most hated websites among students and developers. You might think it's just a place where you do some mental gymnastics in the form of programming, but as tech companies unanimously adopt 'coding challenges' as their hiring standard, Leetcode became a giant mountain that you have to climb to get any kind of employment in tech. I am not commenting on the legitimacy of this method, nor critisizing the (ridiculous) hiring standards. I'm simply stating that it is essential for us CS students :)