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The Toilet PaperWhen testing meets code review: Why and how developers review tests (2018)
Most developers know understand the value of tests. Most developers I know also understand the value of code reviews. Combining those two is a lot harder though, as evidenced by all our JIRA tickets that seem to linger in the “Review” column every sprint. What makes it so hard to review test code?
The Toilet PaperFinding the data unicorn: A hierarchy of hybridity in data and computational journalism (2016)
The title of this week’s paper is fun and short, while its subtitle is pompous and keyword-y. They also have something in common however, as neither makes it clear what the study is about. It actually answers a pretty simple question though: how is data journalism treated in Canada’s legacy news organisations?
Flat EarthConway’s Game of Life: Creating complex patterns from simple rules
Nowadays there’s a simulator for everything. You can pretend you’re a farmer, prison architect or a rollercoaster tycoon – heck, there’s even a Job Simulator for those who… can’t get it enough of it I guess? Fifty years ago there was only Conway’s Game of Life, which was (and arguably still is) an intriguing simulation game.
“Heap, heap, array!”Allonsay’s language classification algorithm
macOS comes with a say command that reads texts out loud using the system’s default voice. Unfortunately, voices are monolingual so if you often consume content in different languages you’re out of luck. Allonsay is a tiny command-line application that detects which language (and thus voice) you need. How does it work?
Evaluating ontological decisions with OntoClean (2002)
I’ve technically been an information scientist for over seven years now and I still can’t explain what the field is really about. What I do know though is that it includes things like ontology engineering: a subject that might feel a bit academic at first, but really should be required reading for anyone who designs domain models.
The Toilet PaperAre static analysis violations really fixed? (2019)
Static analysis tools can help developers improve the quality of their code and help managers (sort of) understand how well a system is built. This is why organisations often promote the use of static analysis tools in software projects. But are they really as useful as they’re made out to be?
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).