Series

Some topics need more than one post. Each series reads in order, start to finish.

series/warehouse-route-optimization 2 parts · 2026 · complete

Warehouse route optimization

A three-part breakdown of a barcode-driven warehouse picking system: how scans became pick routes, why lookup tables beat online pathfinding, and how Excel imports stayed safe against a live ERP database.

1 A pick list is not a route 7 min read
2 Why jump point search lost to a lookup table 9 min read

series/submodular-maximization 4 parts · 2022 · complete

Submodular maximization in practice

What diminishing returns mean formally, why greedy is provably near-optimal, and how lazy evaluation and random subsampling make it scale.

1 An introduction to submodularity 15 min read
2 The greedy algorithm for submodular maximization 11 min read
3 Lazy greedy: speeding up submodular maximization for free 6 min read
4 Stochastic greedy: scaling submodular maximization to massive datasets 9 min read