When I recruit software engineers I always ask them to first take a short online programming test. Following a recommendation from Jeff Atwood, we use Codility as an online programming testing tool. The goal of this test is not to assess whether you are a good programmer. I believe there’s more to software engineering than […]
Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests by Steve Freeman I didn’t know what to expect when I picked up this book. In spite of its excellent reviews I feared it was going to be another redundant addition to the mountain of books harping on the virtues of Test-Driven Development (TDD), without adding anything significant to […]
Suppose you’ve performed some experiment on a given population sample. Each experiment yields a single numeric result. You have also derived the usual statistics (say, the sample mean and the sample standard deviation). Now you want to draw inferences about the rest of the population. How do you do that? I was surprised the other […]
Over the course of four years we have developed, at Neurobat, a set of coding conventions for MATLAB that I would like to share here. The goal of these conventions is three-fold: Help scientists and engineers write clean MATLAB code Help write MATLAB code that will be easily ported to C Provide guidelines to external […]
Even if you’ve installed the PostgreSQL client binaries via Brew (i.e., brew install postgres), you will run into problems if you try to install the RPostgreSQL package in the usual way, i.e. install.packages(‘RPostgreSQL’) from the R console. That’s simply because there are no binaries on CRAN for Mavericks. If you look at http://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_RPostgreSQL.html you’ll see […]
The official video presenting our main product and explaining how it works:
For the past few weeks we’ve been experimenting with a variant of the Pair Programming theme. Conventional wisdom holds that pairs should be rotated frequently, i.e. several times per day. In our experience, this has been hard to sustain. Instead, we’ve experimented with having two team members bond together and take collective ownership of a […]
Most french-speaking professional programmers I’ve worked with will translate “Unit Test” by “Test Unitaire”. This is indeed the term used by the french translation of the Wikipedia article on unit testing. Forgive my obsessive-compulsive disorder, but I believe the proper french translation of “unit test” should be “test unité”, and not “test unitaire”. The english […]
I’m currently taking the Software Testing class on Udacity. The instructor spent a couple of videos discussing the pros and cons of leaving software assertions turned on in your production systems. Here is my interpretation:
If you pick two people at random and measure their heights, what can you say about the average height of the population? When dealing with small sample sizes (less than, say, 20) it’s generally not possible to assume that the sample variance is a good approximation of the population variance. There simply isn’t enough data, […]