Buck Hx is a software engineer, later CTO at The Infatuation, who wrote a Medium response about geofencing data structures.
HN commenters call his post a must-read follow-up on Uber's geofencing service, though one notes a Bing Maps engineer criticized the original as under-engineered.
The Infatuation | Software Engineer: Product | NYC ONSITE | https://www.theinfatuation.com/
We're looking for a product focused front-end engineer to work directly with our CTO (https://medium.com/@buckhx) on our presentation layer. Our users love us and we want to find a clairvoyant to channel their energy into our products.
We've built out a stable, growing business through our partnerships and have recently closed an over-subscribed 2.5m Series A with a focus on growing our engineering team and products.
NYC local required, Full Job Post Here: https://theinfatuation.com/careers/18
If you're interested feel free to reach out to me directly with your resume at buck-at-theinfatuation.com. No recruiters please.
> They delivered value to the business. That's the only thing that matters.
Except this is an engineering blog post, so the engineering part actually matters.
And, as demonstrated in the article [1] linked around this discussion, there were better engineering approaches that would have been even "better for business", as being more efficient means lower costs per transaction and/or higher throughput.
[1] https://medium.com/@buckhx/unwinding-uber-s-most-efficient-service-406413c5871d
This is a very inefficient implementation. Really, just poor quality work overall, as anyone with even a basic understanding of spatial indexing would know that an R-tree would be many times faster, as illustrated here: https://medium.com/@buckhx/unwinding-uber-s-most-efficient-service-406413c5871d
Sometimes it feels like Groundhog Day, behold:
https://medium.com/@buckhx/unwinding-uber-s-most-efficient-service-406413c5871d
tl;dr - S2 is a good library.
There's also a joke in here somewhere about bikeshedding and yak shaving.
That post you linked is the one that got heavily criticised by a Bing Maps engineer for being under-engineered[1].
1. https://medium.com/@buckhx/unwinding-uber-s-most-efficient-service-406413c5871d
An excellent response that I remember from the last time this article made the rounds: https://medium.com/@buckhx/unwinding-uber-s-most-efficient-service-406413c5871d