← Back to Kevin's newslettersPublished: 2018 Oct 25

Hi friends,

Kevin’s in Kraków!

If you’re in the neighborhood, lets meet up!

Or, if you’d like to visit Kraków and jam on a technical project for a few days, my partner and I would love to host you in our extra bedroom. (We are renting a needlessly large apartment, and have karmic debt to repay from all of the couches we crashed on in our 20’s.)

Potential projects:

(Of course, we would also devote extensive time to eating pierogi and kielbasa.)

A shipping puzzle

Last weekend I was nerd-sniped by a friend who shared with me an optimal routing puzzle. I’ve found it to be a fruitful excuse to just explore programming techniques — so far I’ve solved the puzzle twice in Clojure and once in Alloy.

Check out the problem and my solutions.

I plan to try it again in Clojure (using mutation) and again in Rust.

However, the approach I’m most interested in checking out is linear programming / constraint solvers, since those are the techniques that, as far as I’m aware, FedEx and friends use to actually solve this problem in real life.

If you know anything about this stuff, I would love to chat and/or pair program sometime (even just over Skype, without pierogi). Let me know!

Cellular agriculture

You may have heard about lab-grown protein as solution to the ethical and environment downsides of eating meat. I’ve been keeping an eye on that for a few years (I love a good hamburger), but my knowledge has stagnated between “NY Times article” and “podcast interview”.

This week a came across a super interesting technical overview based on patents.

I had to lean on Wikipedia a bit to keep up, but all-in-all the details are far more interesting than what makes it into the pop-sci press.

Turns out the field is more broadly called “cellular agriculture” and biotech startups are pursuing a wide range of things (silk, egg whites, leather, etc.)

Who knows, maybe it is possible to innovate on things besides apps…

Until next time!

Kevin