I suppose I approach this from a background of Computer Science, rather than a background of Software Engineering. As such I'm interested in computation rather

I suppose I approach this from a background of Computer Science, rather than a background of Software Engineering. As such I'm interested in computation rather than "Mr Jones needs to manage his cats, etc". If you described to me some scenario I could probably tell you I wanted a data-structure that offered constant time lookups, or that your graph was sparse and therefore I would prefer an algorithm that ran in O(E) over one that ran in O(V). I certainly couldn't tell you the right class out of the Java Collections library. In any case, it's holiday work.