Levenshtein distance is one of my favorite algorithms. On the surface it seems so very simple, but when you spend some time thinking hard on it deep insights are waiting to be had. The first and most important thing about Levenshtein distance is it’s actually a metric distance. That is, it obeys the triangle inequality. [...]

Some say that API design is one of the hardest things in programming. A few even go as far as to say you should have at least 10 years of experience to even attempt it. While I think this process can be sped up almost an order of magnitude by good mentorship, at one time [...]

It’s funny how over time the meaning of a technical word will converge to something halfway between what the experts intended and some fuzzy notion consisting of the most easily graspable components of that idea. In this inevitable process an idea is stripped of all of its flavor and is reduced to a set of [...]

Inspired by: The Fresh Prince of Bell Labs #codingsitcoms — Tim Pettersen (@kannonboy) July 16, 2012 In Petoskey, Michigan born and raised Tinkering with gadgets I spent most of my days Chillin out, maxin, relaxing with Boole, And working on my master’s outside of the school When a couple of Nazis who were up to [...]

Taking the Coursera Probabilistic Graphical Models course has had me thinking a lot about complexity. Lately, program state complexity in the context of testing in particular. How many discrete tests would it take to ensure every combination of inputs is correct? Let’s do some back of the napkin math and see what we come up [...]