I recently came across your site and found it to be relevant to our Seattle ticket site - Seattle Ticket Finder.I would dearly love to get a peek at the algorithm that decided that the United States Grand Lodge of Ordo Templi Orientis.is relevant to locating local-event tickets in Seattle. Maybe we have a fundraising project I haven't heard about?
Speaking of algorithms, I have been having an amazing week at work. I've spent years studying the "patterns" model of software design, which attempts to reduce various meso-scale components of software design and implementation to a manageable set of stereotypical interaction patterns. I've gotten good at using (and thinking in) the language of patterns, but never really hit that payoff moment when it made my life (and my code) noticeably better -- until this week. I suddenly saw a way to apply the Visitor and Decorator patterns to our most memory-hungry process -- one that is threatening to make our application unusable -- in a way that almost completely eliminates the need for large intermediate data structures; and it was those large structures that were causing most of our problems. What's more, the resulting code is cleaner, clearer, more maintainable, and more extensible. Life at the day job is very good indeed right now.
Last night I taught my class on the symbolism of directions and locations at LVX; it went very well, I thought. I had two tiny notebook pages of scribbled notes, as is my usual pattern; also as usual, I was still on the first page when we took our halfway-point break. Attendees were in a boisterous and talkative mood, which always makes me happy; I much prefer discussions to lectures. Now I need to get cracking on scheduling classes for June. As my proposed unofficial LVX motto puts it: The fun never stops.
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