Today I want to give an example of a situation where understanding what’s going on at a combinatorial level can yield a very nice solution. Spefically, I want to look at Leetcode problem 17. It’s pretty simple: Let the letters of the alphabet map to numbers via the telephone keypad. In case you don’t have a phone handy, the map looks like this: abc -> 2 def -> 3 ghi -> 4 jkl -> 5 mno -> 6 pqrs -> 7 tuv -> 8 wxyz -> 9 We’re given a sequence of digits, and we are told to reconstruct every possible sequence of letters that could have yielded this seqeuence of digits. (read more)

Today I want to talk about something I call semantic logic. This is something I started thinking about after playing with Haskell some months ago. The name probably makes it sound like some sort of esoteric symbolic logic, but it’s really just a practical programming concept. Disclaimer: I don’t know much about language design or the intricacies of functional programming models, so I may be retreading some basic ideas. However, I haven’t seen anybody talk about these ideas in this way, so here it goes. (read more)

I’ve been researching ecommerce frameworks for a project I’m embarking on. My key requirements are pretty simple: Manage small inventory of physical goods (a few dozen SKUs to start with) Manage fulfillment (shipping workflow) of said goods Allow for custom discounts based on presence of specific goods in order Light and fast Ideally open-source, as I plan on managing deployment and hosting Also relevant is the fact that I plan on being the sole administrator of this webshop for the foreseeable future, so it’s ok if the system isn’t wrapped in a nice gui. (read more)