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 […]
ISH, held every two years in Frankfurt, describes itself as “The world’s leading trade fair The Bathroom Experience, Building, Energy, Air-conditioning Technology, Renewable Energies”. At Neurobat we develop systems for improved and more efficient indoor climate control systems, and it was only natural that we attend as visitors. A small party from our company visited […]
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 […]
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: