We once spent almost a week chasing after a mysterious memory leak in our application, built on top of the highly regarded eCos real-time operating system. The leak appeared after we had rewritten some of our code in C++ after recognising that C’s object-oriented capabilities were no longer adequate for our needs. After about half […]
A few weeks ago, our team held a sprint retrospective (which I unfortunately couldn’t attend) during which it was decided to shorten our sprint length from two weeks to one. The team was right in their decision, but probably for the wrong reasons and here’s why I think so. The main driver behind this decision […]
On thing has been bugging me for quite some time now as I observe our team at Neurobat. Most stories on our sprint board are being worked on by one developer each, leading to daily scrums where everyone reports on work that is completely independent from that of the others. Even though we encourage people […]
CARNOT (Conventional And Renewable eNergy systems Optimization Toolbox) is a set of MATLAB & Simulink models for simulating buildings and building systems, e.g. boilers, heat distributors etc. It’s been developed by a collaboration involving several companies and universities and is generally well-regarded. It’s one of several MATLAB toolboxes dedicated to the problem of simulating building […]
I would like to call this the best second book on R, except that I wouldn’t know what the first one would be. I learned R from classes and tutorials about 10 years ago, used it on my PhD and four articles, and use it today on a daily basis at work; yet only now, […]
Over the past five years, our team has attended more than 120 daily standup meetings, carefully following the “canonical” format and having each team member answer the usual questions: What did you do yesterday? What will you do today? Any impediments? There seems to be one flaw with this format, however. The flaw is […]
… you find a wireless room temperature sensor in your fridge:
When I take a picture with my vertically-held iPhone, here is what happens when I insert it as-is in this blog: But the picture shows up correctly when I open it in any OSX application, such as Preview. The issue is that when you take a picture with your iPhone, a meta-data tag gets written […]
During a recent sprint retrospective we raised a problem with the way we assign code reviews. Not the formal, whole-team ones, but the regular ones we solicit for each pull request. The problem was that we tend to select our reviewers based on various subjective criteria, including how well we like the person. I admit […]
Some programmers, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use floating point arithmetic.” Now they have 1.999999999997 problems. // Tom Scott Floating point arithmetic is notoriously hard to get right. I consider writing a bug-free, optimally performant numeric library to be approximately as hard as writing a compiler. Fortunately, most programmers don’t need […]