Series

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

series/warehouse-route-optimization 3 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
3 The Excel Round Trip That Kept Warehouse Data Safe 7 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 16 min read
2 The Greedy Algorithm for Submodular Maximization 12 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