Plurrrr

Sat 27 Feb 2021

Creating serendipity with Python

We've been experimenting with breaking up employees into random groups (of size 4) and setting up video hangouts between them. We're doing this to replace the serendipitous meetings that sometimes occur around coffee machines, in lunch lines or while waiting for the printer. And also, we just want people to get to know each other.

Which lead to me writing some code. The core of which is divide n elements into groups of at least size g minimizing the size of each group. So, suppose an office has 15 employees in it then it would be divided into three groups of sizes 5, 5, 5; if an office had 16 employees it would be 4, 4, 4, 4; if it had 17 employees it would be 4, 4, 4, 5 and so on.

Source: Creating serendipity with Python, an article by John Graham-Cumming.

PureScript and Haskell

In this post I’ll compare and contrast my experiences writing the same program in Haskell and PureScript. The application I built was “real” enough to have some interesting design challenges. They included:

  • Exposing an HTTP endpoint
  • Parsing and generating JSON
  • Full-text search

Source: PureScript and Haskell, an article by Drew Olson.