I was helping interview a candidate at work today. They asked me what my favorite data structure was. Perhaps surprisingly, I had an answer. A trie.

A trie for keys "A", "to", "tea", "ted", "ten", "i", "in", and "inn". Each complete English word has an arbitrary integer value associated with it.

When I was in college, we implemented our own trie structures as part of a project to implement a spell checker. I remember working on that project and feeling a great sense of accomplishment. So it's just been my favorite ever since. I haven't had opportunity to use one after that project , but I think about tries more than you'd expect. But tries are out there. Hono even has a TrieRouter.

So there you have it, my favorite data structure, the trie. What's yours?