Home
What’s new
The Toilet PaperSearch as a news curator: The role of Google in shaping attention to news information (2019)
When you use a search engine to learn more about current events, you often implicitly assume that it has a reasonably complete coverage of all news sources and that it presents its search results fairly and objectively. This study suggests that those assumptions might not be entirely fair.
Superproductivity at room temperatureJoin the ACM for the magazine, stay for the books
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has nearly 100,000 members, which makes it the world’s largest computing society – but you’ve probably never heard of it or forgotten all about it. I’m going to tell you to join it, and tell you why I think it’s such a good idea (the title kind of already gives it away though).
The Toilet PaperAutomating chaos experiments in production (2019)
If you use a microservice architecture, you want to make sure that all those services play well with each other. You’ll also want to test what happens when a service suddenly becomes slow or fails completely. Should you create a production-like test environment for such tests? No, of course not – just test on production!
Flat EarthHas Apple lost its mind?
No one was entirely sure what would happen to Apple when its CEO, Steve Jobs, died in 2011. Would someone else take up the torch and carry on Jobs’s legacy or would Apple slowly devolve into a faceless money-grabbing corporation like its main competitor? Many believed that the latter would happen.
The Toilet PaperUnderstanding children’s perception of privacy risks online (2019)
Our children grow up in a digitally connected world that’s eager to gather as much information as possible about its users. Children understand some of the more explicit privacy risks that come with the use of online apps and games, but appear to struggle with more complicated concepts.
“Heap, heap, array!”Finding the most common words in a set of texts for a word cloud
Suppose that someone walks over to your desk and asks you to create a word cloud from some news articles. The sensible thing to do here would be to tell them that “word clouds are very 2006 and people who still use them should be shot”. You don’t want to come off as rude however, so you agree to help them.
The Toilet PaperUsing planning poker for combining expert estimates in software projects (2008)
This week’s post looks at planning poker, a technique for estimating the effort needed to complete user stories rather than entire projects. Planning poker is typically used in conjunction with Scrum, so most of you will already know what planning poker is and how it works. But how well does it work?
The Toilet PaperNegative results for software effort estimation (2017)
COCOMO is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot in engineering schools, but seemingly disappears into thin air once you enter the software industry “because reliable effort estimation is a holy grail” or “because it’s obsolete”. This study shows that in the case of effort estimation methods, newer isn’t necessarily better.
“Heap, heap, array!”(Not) looping over lists in PHP
This is a lazy blog post for people who are too lazy to browse through PHP’s array function documentation. I’ll show three methods that help you create new lists or values based on an existing list: array_map(), array_reduce(), and array_filter().
The Toilet PaperScalable transfer patterns (2016)
Route planning is largely a solved problem. Route planning for public transport networks can still be challenging however, especially if it those networks need to cover the entire world. This week’s paper gives you some insight into the steps that are needed to make it work (preferably before the heat death of the universe).
Flat EarthChina Southern Airlines
English is hard and doesn’t always make sense; it’s incredibly easy to make mistakes, especially for non-native speakers. That’s totally fine. What I don’t get is how deep-pocketed corporations like China Southern Airlines can have websites and safety videos that are clearly full of mistakes.
The Toilet PaperGender diversity and women in software teams (2019)
Software development teams in western countries largely consist of males or are even male-only. Hiring policies that favour women over men can help restore the balance somewhat, but are also controversial. Do these policies actually make economical sense? Spoiler alert: yes, they do.
The Toilet PaperUnderstanding large-scale software – A hierarchical view (2019)
Large software systems are more expensive to maintain – not because changes require more code, but because it’s harder to understand such systems. Many developers and studies focus on things like cyclomatic complexity and API documentation, but they aren’t exactly helpful if you need to understand entire systems.
The Toilet PaperPractitioners’ views on good software testing practices (2019)
Good developers write good automated test cases for their work before handing it over to others or their future selves. Most of us have strong opinions on what makes automated test cases good, but let’s see what other people think!
The Toilet PaperBeyond the code itself: How programmers really look at pull requests (2019)
Approval (or rejection) of pull requests is mostly done based on its contents. But it’s not just about the code – especially when the changes are proposed by someone you don’t know. This week’s paper examines the signals that developers look at when reviewing pull requests from unfamiliar contributors.
The Toilet PaperMigrating to GraphQL: A practical assessment (2019)
Facebook’s GraphQL query language helps you create APIs that are both powerful and flexible. Its proponents often like to claim that the days of REST as the prevailing API design paradigm are over, but the rest of the world hasn’t quite caught up yet. Is now the time to make the switch?