The Toilet Paper

Summaries of scientific papers without the boring sciencey bits. Ideal for bathroom and other types of breaks.

This study pits 14 open-source main content extractors against each other and arrives at a somewhat surprising conclusion.

End-to-end tests can help you discover problems in web applications, but sadly are not free of problems themselves.

Supersharers managed to reach 5.2% of registered voters. In contrast, Russia’s 2016 campaign only reached 3.4% of voters.

Although predatory journals may sound scary, they are actually quite friendly (and after your money).

Public service broadcasting has served us well in the 20th century. How can it keep serving us well (well) into the 21st century?

Sharing is caring, but if you really care about sharing research you should probably do more than just share links to papers.

New live broadcasting technologies have transformed how news organisations work, in both good and bad ways.

Helm charts are re-usable packages for Kubernetes resources. They are easy to share and use, but this comes at a price.

How can an organisation best support Scrum teams? This paper proposes and validates a theory for effective Scrum teams.

Flaky tests can cause CI builds to fail unexpectedly, and should be fixed as quickly as possible. This study shows why.

The experience of reviewing code is negatively impacted by a number of misalignments, which are described in this paper.

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.

Since its introduction a few years ago, GitHub Actions has become the dominant CI service. How did this affect competing CI services?

Coming up with good prompts for LLMs like ChatGPT can be quite a challenge. This study sheds some light on what makes it so hard.

This is a summary of a paper that poses a simple question and uses a simple method to find a simple answer.

Logging statements can be very valuable for various reasons, but aren’t entirely free of cost. What’s the best way to use them?

Happy workers are productive workers. Limiting unhappiness can be a good way to increase the happiness of your workers.

Public service media exist because they provide value to the general public (who also happen to pay for them).

This week’s paper presents a catalogue of best practices for infrastructure as code programs.

Many PhD students suffer from mental health issues. This study investigates the underlying reasons and explores potential interventions.

Pull request bots can provide both maintainers and contributors with a lot of useful information, but sometimes less is more.

For a long time, the Roman Empire was ruled by just one man. This all changed when emperor Diocletian ascended to the throne.

A qualitative case study shows how we can design a smooth onboarding experience for agile software development teams.