Algorithms

I’m working on a project where we are using Azure B2C Active Directory to provide authentication so that we can avoid the security headaches associated with managing a password store for it. Unfortunately, the current implementation doesn’t support .NET Windows applications or standalone services where no user-interface is present - it will eventually, but I can’t wait on the eventual delivery date for these two use-cases. I don’t want to re-introduce user name/password for this, as I’d introduce the same security issues that I was trying to avoid in the first place, but following a bit of research I decided the way forward was HMAC authentication.

I was chatting to a colleague recently who although he was a very good programmer, did not have a computer science/maths background – this was fine until he wanted to use bubble sort on a large(ish) (100k) number of records and I had to explain to him about how algorithms that take n2 time are not your friend for big (or even little) n. One of the most important decisions you can make when optimizing an application is the up-front choice of algorithm to use, performance tuning and optimization can make a difference but you are very lucky to achieve 2x-5x improvement, to be able to make 10x or 100x improvement in your application you need decent algorithm choice.