The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Just how many engineers does it take to solve a simple geometry problem?

Two months later and we're still waiting to install updates to “Project: Sippy-Cup” into production. We were finally given the “okay” this week, but have twice scrubbed the launch deployment because … “reasons.”

Sigh.

So there's very little for us (the Call Processing team at the Ft. Lauderdale Office of The Corporation) to do this week. And because of that, I've started back to work on a small geometry problem that floated around the office some time last year—find “x”:

[Note: it's not to scale. And no, circling the “x” and scribbling “Found it!” is not the answer.]

I can't be that hard, right? All you need to solve it is geometry. You know, the interior angles of a triangle sum to 180°, what constitutes congruent triangles, all that stuff you should have learned in the 10th grade but have probably forgotten by now.

Um … yeah.

[Sure, ∠CEA ≅ ∠CQB, but where does that get us?]

Fellow cow-orker T didn't solve it (and took a copy home for his son to work on). T2 solved it by using trigonometry. And it took a few hours of hashing it out between myself and R to get a purely geometric solution to it.

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