Call stack complexity

Matthew Sackman wrote “Over on the morning paper, Adrian’s recently covered a number of papers looking at trying to detect bugs in code using slightly unusual means (i.e. not the usual combination of lots of buggy tests and lots of static checks). So that’s been on my mind lately, at least when it gets a chance in between…”

Practising Software Engineering

Matthew Sackman wrote “A tourist stops a musician on the streets of New York. “Excuse me, can you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?” “Of course”, answers the musician, “Practise, practise, practise!” In the book ‘Outliers: The Story of Success’, the author Malcolm Gladwell repeatedly mentions the “10,000-Hour Rule”, claiming that the key to achieving world…”

The life-changing magic of refactoring

James Uther wrote “I’m really a unix guy, but I have to admit, the whole .NET/SQLserver stack is hugely empowering. An average employee can take it, and with next to no knowledge or experience, but with a lot of determination and time, can write enough code to underpin an entire company. You start with a windows form, place…”

Let’s Run Science! Part iota;

James Uther wrote “In our last jaunt, we had a look at code that take all the various measurements of temperature that have been taken over the last few hundred years, and pull them together into something we can usefully run stats on. The headline finding of all this is that on average, the planet has warmed over…”

Java multi methods new home

David Ireland wrote “I’ve split Java multi-methods out of LShift’s Java library. That’s mostly because Guava has equivalents for just about everything else in the library, but the multi-methods part is still unique, as far as I’m aware. You can find it here. You can raise tickets there as well. For more information, see the original post. Here’s…”

Memory matters – even in Erlang

Marek Majkowski wrote “Some time ago we got an interesting bug report for RabbitMQ. Surprisingly, unlike other complex bugs, this one is easy to describe:  At some point basic.get suddenly starts being very slow – about 9 times slower!”