<story><title>Applying Textbook Data Structures for Real Life Wins</title><url>https://heap.io/blog/engineering/applying-textbook-data-structures-for-real-life-wins</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nraynaud</author><text>A few years back I had a traveling salesperson problem, I googled a bit, and somehow didn&amp;#x27;t find anything interesting, so I just created a random loop, and randomly mutated it until it got better. A few months ago I discovered a neat little heuristic: the best loop never self-intersect. And a few days ago, I found that there is a definite algorithm that gives a result whose worst case is bounded WRT to the optimal.&lt;p&gt;My question is how do you find all those algorithms? Wikipedia never really feel like a good introductory nor discovery place. In particular, some problems have been perfectly studied by scholars, but you don&amp;#x27;t find them because you have not found the keywords that will direct google in your search. And I am not a researcher, so I don&amp;#x27;t keep a tab on a domain, I&amp;#x27;m a jack of all trades, I work on a wide set of things.</text></comment>
<story><title>Applying Textbook Data Structures for Real Life Wins</title><url>https://heap.io/blog/engineering/applying-textbook-data-structures-for-real-life-wins</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bunsenmcdubbs</author><text>Hey, author here! I&amp;#x27;ve been working on infrastructure and database-y things at Heap for the last couple years, ranging from improving Postgres performance and availability to building out services (like this one!) and refactoring, encapsulating, and optimizing core systems.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll try to answer any questions about the post (technical or otherwise).&lt;p&gt;Edit: added more details about me.</text></comment>