Luke Richardson wrote “I recently read the first chapter of the 20th anniversary version of the well known software development handbook: The Pragmatic Programmer. Since this, I have had a good amount of time to reflect and observe the principles in action so I decided to write a brief summary and some of my thoughts and attitudes towards working after reading it. ”
Patrick Tschorn wrote “Sometimes, it is obvious that a project needs machine learning, but you can tell that simply pumping the data through all the algorithms in a popular library (and picking the one algorithm that performs least badly) is not the answer. Machine learning libraries cannot cover all algorithms, trade-offs and heuristics specific to arbitrary problem domains.…”
Tom Parker-Shemilt wrote “Four years ago, I built a Dalek-based telepresence bot (part 1, part 2), and I’d been idly thinking for some time that what I really needed to do was make a better follow-up, as a much better one could probably be done with Lego Mindstorms especially given the existence of the BrickPi board for interfacing…”
Patrick Tschorn wrote “Ok, that title is tongue-in-cheek clickbait, but here are three books which in my opinion are likely to broaden your horizon by offering surprising perspectives on the most powerful tool that you have at your disposal: your mind (and your body). I have found these books to be filled with interesting observations and pieces of…”
James Uther wrote “A little while ago we were asked if we could do a talk on ‘developer experience’ at QCon. I volunteered. We were having lots of fun at the time building a CI/CD system out of Jenkins and Kubernetes, and using a bunch of hipster languages in the project and I thought I would be pulling…”
![By Mboldfield at English Wikipedia [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://tech.labs.oliverwyman.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Ben_Stack_August_2007_1_box.jpg)
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…”
![By Btcpg (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://tech.labs.oliverwyman.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/cowpoo.jpg)
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…”
![By Wjablow (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://tech.labs.oliverwyman.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/closet.jpg)
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…”
![By Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC (http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=5161) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://tech.labs.oliverwyman.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/tropical-storm.jpg)
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…”
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…”
![By Tangopaso (Self-photographed) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://tech.labs.oliverwyman.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/crowd.jpg)
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!”
Marek Majkowski wrote “Usually, search engines can look through data outdated by a few days. But Twitter search seems to be returning real time search results. That’s why it’s interesting how it works. In this post I’ll present a short introduction to full-text search engines and my private thoughts about a possible implementation of a better one. Let’s…”
Tony Garnock-Jones wrote “Speaking of OMeta/JS [old link: http://jarrett.cs.ucla.edu/ometa-js] and OMeta in general, I’ve implemented an OMeta for Scheme. Currently it runs in MzScheme, but it should be fairly portable, with dependencies only on a handful of commonly-implemented SRFIs. I intend to properly libraryise it — making it into a proper MzScheme module — and to port it…”
Tony Garnock-Jones wrote “After my talk on Javascript DVCS at the Osmosoft Open Source Show’n’tell, I went to visit Osmosoft, the developers of TiddlyWiki, to talk about giving TiddlyWiki some DVCS-like abilities. Martin Budden and I sat down and built a couple of prototypes: one where each tiddler is versioned every time it is edited, and one where…”
Tony Garnock-Jones wrote “Yesterday I visited Osmosoft, the developers of TiddlyWiki, to chat about getting some DVCS-like functionality into TiddlyWiki. Jeremy mentioned in passing that TiddlyWiki is, if you squint, a slightly cheating kind of a Quine. It struck me this morning that TiddlyWiki has strong similarities to another famous almost-Quine, the Smalltalk system. TiddlyWiki is a composition…”
Tony Garnock-Jones wrote “Upon browsing the source to the excellent MochiWeb, I came across a call to a function that, when I looked, wasn’t defined anywhere. This, it turns out, was a clue: Erlang has undocumented syntactic support for late-bound method dispatch, i.e. lightweight object-oriented programming! The following example, myclass.erl, is a parameterized module, a feature that arrived…”
