programming

I've looked up about Munkres in the past and from what I've read, the two things he is known for his books, especially topology, and for some an algorithm I didn't bother to look up at the time.

Now that the uni semester is finally over, I tried tackling some of my small programming projects, and I found myself needing to solve an interesting problem. For a given $m \times n$ matrix, I need to extract a subset of its entries, such that every row and column has at most one chosen entry (and containing as many rows/columns as possible, which means we're choosing $k$ elements, where $k$ is the minimum between $m$ and $n$), while minimizing their total sum.

Turns out the so-called Munkres assignment algorithm does exactly what this problem describes. Like, it has nothing to do with topology, it's pretty much a very crazy coincidence. I don't know how it works though, I just imported a library for now.

One of the biggest issues about programming is that coding isn't enough. I love writing code, I love tackling a problem and writing a program that does a task I want, and figuring out how to optimize or have fun with it. However, programming is also about integrating tools together. Maybe you have some sort of backend running your code, or you're making some code which will embed in some other programming language, or you have to balance between multiple different apps.

My biggest issue with all things like that is web dev. Because guess what? You wanna make a REST API? You wanna make a database integrated with that API? You wanna make a dynamic website that makes requests to that API that has access to the database? Guess what, doing all that is the easy part! Having all of that setup and running in your localhost is a smooth process, which follows by the absolute existential dread of figuring out how to make that public.