Like many good stories, this one started with a simple question. Should small Rust structs be passed by-copy or by-borrow?
Source: Should small Rust structs be passed by-copy or by-borrow?, an article by Forrest Smith.
As much as we all enjoy writing SQL and “doing everything in Postgres,” we are very well aware that databases do not live in a vacuum and were not invented for our pleasure and enjoyment. We may come up with new extensions and innovative indexes; we may improve the query planner and speed up backups, but if application developers don’t use these features, nobody will appreciate our efforts.
Source: PostgreSQL and Software Development.
Binary search is a workhorse of competitive programming. There are occasional easy problems where binary search is the solution in and of itself; more often, it’s used as a primitive building block of more complex algorithms. It is often presented as a way to find the index of something in a sorted array in O(lg n) time, and many languages have such a thing in their standard library (for example, see Arrays.binarySearch in Java, the bisect library in Python, or the binary_search function in C++). However, the idea of binary search is more general than searching in a sorted array; we’re doing binary search any time we repeatedly halve a search interval. For example, we can use it to find the smallest or largest number with a given property, or to find an optimal, “just right” measurement that is neither too small nor too big.
Source: Competitive programming in Haskell: better binary search, an article by Brent A. Yorgey.