This was my next up from last time and it feels like I should actually follow my plans one day…

• How about those unit tests?
• Being able to hot start
  • So provide a partial solution to find a feasible solution faster
  • If the partial solution is wrong or optimality should be reached then backtrack all the way back
• Oh yeah I need to decide on the logo. Please help! Logo issue

At least I did some of it.

I have to say that in this times I really don’t have a timetable and just do what I want which sometimes is not that much 😀

Sorry for not posting consistently. In this post I try to bring you to the current stage of what I’m doing.

Logo

I finally decided on a logo for the constraint solver which took a very long time but I’m finally happy with a design that is mostly inspired from @owiecc and @pdimens on this issue.

Thanks everyone who supported me on that decision and gave me tips over Twitter and GitHub as well as friends over WhatsApp.

I’m happy to present my solver with that logo next year at the JuMP-dev 2021 conference 🙂

Exercism

You see that this is one of those posts that have too many topics in it as I wasn’t able to write down smaller ones in between. Hope it is still a useful one and doesn’t read like a boring diary 😀

Two awesome guys in the julia community, namely Jacob Zelko and Miguel Raz Guzmán, pointed out exercism which is an awesome website to learn a bunch of programming languages including julia. I feel like my code is not too bad but one can always improve, right? Especially in those areas I normally don’t really use like strings, chars and similar concepts which don’t occur often in mathematical programming. I mean I study computer science and I have the general knowledge, hopefully, but every language is different so it’s always good to learn. Anyway I decided to solve some problems on that website which works normally in the following way.

You

• download a problem
• solve it locally
• check the test cases
• submit your code
• get feedback from a mentor
• iterate

I normally know websites which use the first 4 steps but normally I don’t get real feedback about code style or performance.
The “problem” is that you have to wait for mentoring as it’s not done by computers (yet). Because I’m in central Europe I had to wait quite some time before I got feedback to a solution I submitted when the folks from America are normally sleeping, I actually signed up for being a mentor myself.

I got sucked in immediately after an awesome mentor worked through my submissions quite fast and I mentored students in solutions I got mentored it already.
Mentored quite a lot of people and got some positive feedback but most importantly for my egoistic self I learned a lot by…