David's blog

Err and err and err but less and less and less

David's blog

Err and err and err but less and less and less

Year: 2016

How I review papers

Once you publish a paper in a journal, you are expected to regularly review papers for that journal. It’s part of the normal scientific process. Some may consider it a chore, but I see it as an opportunity to keep in touch with my field and to help quality papers get published. When I was first […]

The DEBORAH project kick-off meeting

We are involved in DEBORAH, a Eurostars project nr E!10286,  led by EQUA Simulation AB, the vendor of the highly regarded IDA ICE building simulation software. Together with CSEM and Bengt Dahlgren AB, a Swedish consultancy firm specialised in buildings, the project’s stated objective is to optimise the design and operation of district thermal energy systems. We held the […]

Being blocked doesn’t mean you cannot work

If you’ve been on a Scrum team for some time, you will inevitably hear someone at the stand-up say: Today I cannot work on <some feature> because of <some reason>, but that’s all right. I’m not otherwise blocked because I can also work on <some unrelated thing>. There are two (very human) factors at play […]

Was “Building Science” really the best we could come up with?

The big problem with Building Science is that we call it Building Science. The academic study of buildings and their inhabitants is a young discipline; possibly even younger than Computer Science. The earliest articles in Building and Environment appear to date from 1966; Building Research & Information, from 1973. Like Computer Science, we have no single […]

Linus Torvalds thinks like a chess grandmaster

I’ve uncovered evidence that Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, may entertain a secret hobby. An interview of Linus Torvalds in a recent issue of IEEE Spectrum had the following passage: I’d rather make a decision that turns out to be wrong later than waffle about possible alternatives for too long. On the surface, this sounds […]

Where all floating-point values are above average

When you just fix a programming bug quickly, you lose. You waste a previous opportunity to think and reflect on what led to this error, and to improve as a craftsman. Some time ago, I discovered a bug. The firmware was crashing, seemingly at random. It was eventually resolved, the fix reviewed and tested, and […]

The one question not to ask at the standup meeting

What is the very first question one is supposed to answer during a standup meeting? If your answer is: What did you do since the last standup? then congratulations. You have given the canonical answer recommended by Mike Cohn himself. But I am now convinced that this is the wrong question to ask. When you […]

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