Building rule-based machine learning systems from scratch

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.…”

Lego Telepresence bot: how not to try and build one

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…”

Three books every software developer should read in 2019

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…”

Improving Life in Smaller, Heterogeneous Projects

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…”

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!”