Welcome back! As we continue our exploration of data structures, our focus now turns to the versatile queue. Imagine being at your favorite coffee shop where orders are taken on a first-come, first-served basis. This process exemplifies how queues function in computer science, making them ideal for modeling scenarios such as printing documents, handling customer service requests, or managing tasks in computing. Today, we will tackle two common interview problems that utilize queues to demonstrate their practical application in solving real-world challenges.

We will be using a simple array to represent our queue, using the push method to add an element to the queue, and the shift method to dequeue an element from the queue.

When merging data from two different sources, we seek to alternate between each source fairly, much like traffic from two lanes merging on a highway. Cars from both lanes are expected to merge seamlessly, taking turns. In the world of data structures, we face a similar task of intertwining two queues.

Suppose you're working with two devices that send printing tasks to a shared printer. You would alternate print jobs from each device's queue to prevent one device from monopolizing the printer. We will combine two queues by alternating their elements.

Let's work through the implementation step by step, using TypeScript: