“Knuth used a technique of Ralph Gomory published the same year, which he somehow became aware of despite the absence of email, the web, Arxiv, or large language models.”
https://nathanbrixius.wordpress.com/2024/04/13/don-knuths-mip-64-years-later/
Good blog posts teach you something new, Great blog posts give you more good blog posts.
Before reading the posts above, I’d never heard of Operations Research but now I’m thoroughly fascinated by it and have yet another area of research to look into.
I’ve yet to see a field where curiosity wasn’t a force multiplier in skill development and it’s no different in software development. I encourage everyone I’ve mentored to voraciously collect articles, posts and books in any field they want to pursue seriously. You won’t always be at the appropriate skill level to absorb the information contained within but even the act of moving a concept from an unknown unknown to a known unknown is a win all on it’s own.
The more articles you read, the more perspectives you consider, the more technologies you test, the better a developer you’ll be.
There’s no better feeling than having tested out a new technology or studied some niche topic and then running into it on a professional project. It may not happen often but when it does it makes the project much more fun to tackle.
Thanks for reading and as always, all comments, critiques and questions are highly appreciated. Here's a link to the previous article response.