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 […]
From Mike Cohn’s User Stories Applied, there was this little paragraph that I think many teams (including my own) tend to forget about: Developer Responsibilities You are responsible for providing information (sometimes including your underlying assumptions and possible alternatives) to the customer in order to help her prioritize the stories. You are responsible for resisting […]
The frequentist vs bayesian debate has plagued the scientific community for almost a century now, yet most of the arguments I’ve seen seem to involve philosophical considerations instead of hard data. Instead of letting the sun explode, I propose a simpler experiment to assess the performance of each approach. The problem reads as follows (taken […]