Last year I wrote a simple script to automate posting our On-Call schedule. It worked by reading the schedule from a Google Spreadsheet, looking up the names in Slack, and then sharing these usernames on Slack. A tiny problem I ran into was the fact that since I was using an exact match the names in the spreadsheet had to match the names in Slack. This is a trivial problem to solve since we have a finite number of engineers but it still felt a bit too sensitive. While lying in bed last night I got to thinking of ways to measure similarity between the names in order to make it a bit more fuzzy. I’ve used the Levenshtein distance in the past but it felt a bit too clinical for what I was trying to do and I wondered whether it was possible to do a phonetic match.

After during some research I discovered, unsurprisingly, that there’s a whole category of phonetic algorithms designed to solve these problems. The original was Soundex but has been superseded by the Metaphone family. What’s interesting is that their implementation is more heuristic than anything else. They were primarily designed for the English language and have a series of rules to simplify words or names into much simpler forms that avoid confusion. For example, one of the rules says to treat the letter V the same as the letter F while another says to treat the letter Q the same as K. Using hundreds or thousands of these transformations with a litany of exceptions leads to a canonical word which can then be compared against others.

I find this approach fascinating since it’s so antithetical to the modern approach of collecting a ton of data and pumping it through some machine learning algorithms. Instead this feels like a finely tweaked series of if-else statements designed for a single purpose.