Science
Mostly just summaries of scientific papers for people without an academic background.
The Toilet Paper
The privacy threats of browser extension fingerprinting
Installing browser extensions can be bad for your privacy, even if they were made in good faith.
The Toilet Paper
Be careful when browsing for browser extensions in the Chrome Web Store
This paper provides an analysis of browser extensions in the Chrome Web Store based on historical data and their source code.
The Toilet Paper
Are bugs more expensive to fix in production?
Everyone knows that the cost of fixing a bug grows exponentially as it progresses through development phases. But is that actually true?
The Toilet Paper
Design patterns for energy-efficient Web applications
Applying these design patterns in your code may (or may not) make your web applications more energy-efficient.
The Toilet Paper
The challenges of microservice API evolution
Evolving microservice APIs requires a lot of work, both from the providing and the consuming side.
The Toilet Paper
Visual disinformation on alternative media platforms
Alternative media platforms and their communities use visual disinformation in a variety of ways.
The Toilet Paper
Mapping the use of AI in counter-disinformation
Most initiatives that use artificial intelligence to combat disinformation are clustered around two continents.
The Toilet Paper
Scaling the API design review process at Google
Google’s API Governance process makes sure that the design and development of its APIs meets the company’s standards.
The Toilet Paper
Prompt patterns for LLMs that help you design better software
Large language models (LLMs) may not be replacing developers anytime soon, but can still be of use in the design process.
The Toilet Paper
Using humour to make software development more enjoyable
This study looks at how humour can fuel developer engagement in open-source and professional contexts.
The Toilet Paper
Recovering software architectures via chain-of-thought prompting
Large language models can be used to deduce to what extent your system’s implementation still adheres to a reference architecture.
The Toilet Paper
Comparing algorithms for extracting content from web pages
This study pits 14 open-source main content extractors against each other and arrives at a somewhat surprising conclusion.
The Toilet Paper
The challenges of end-to-end testing and how to face them
End-to-end tests can help you discover problems in web applications, but sadly are not free of problems themselves.
The Toilet Paper
Supersharers of fake news on Twitter during the 2020 US presidential election
Supersharers managed to reach 5.2% of registered voters. In contrast, Russia’s 2016 campaign only reached 3.4% of voters.
The Toilet Paper
Why some researchers publish in predatory journals
Although predatory journals may sound scary, they are actually quite friendly (and after your money).
The Toilet Paper
Can public service broadcasting survive Silicon Valley?
Public service broadcasting has served us well in the 20th century. How can it keep serving us well (well) into the 21st century?
The Toilet Paper
Sharing software engineering research on LinkedIn
Sharing is caring, but if you really care about sharing research you should probably do more than just share links to papers.
The Toilet Paper
How cellular-based technologies have transformed live broadcasting
New live broadcasting technologies have transformed how news organisations work, in both good and bad ways.
Drinking the Kubernetes Kool-Aid
Helm may be a popular solution, but not necessarily a safe one
Helm charts are re-usable packages for Kubernetes resources. They are easy to share and use, but this comes at a price.
The Toilet Paper
A theory of Scrum team effectiveness
How can an organisation best support Scrum teams? This paper proposes and validates a theory for effective Scrum teams.
The Toilet Paper
How software developers deal with flaky tests
Flaky tests can cause CI builds to fail unexpectedly, and should be fixed as quickly as possible. This study shows why.
The Toilet Paper
Why people find it hard to review code
The experience of reviewing code is negatively impacted by a number of misalignments, which are described in this paper.
The Toilet Paper
A comparison of open tracing tools
I’m in the market for a tool that can help me analyse logs, traces, and metrics, and I was hoping that this paper could help me pick one.
The Toilet Paper
GitHub Actions is eating the world
Since its introduction a few years ago, GitHub Actions has become the dominant CI service. How did this affect competing CI services?